


I. No Gentle Place

by remnantof



Series: One For The Road [1]
Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Ahakmara Lore, Awoken Character, Break Up, Class Differences, Developing Relationship, Drug Use, Friends With Benefits, Grief/Mourning, Hook-Up, Hook-Up to Romance, M/M, Major Original Character(s), POV Original Character, Set before game canon, Sex, Sex Work, Thanatonaut Character, Warlock / Hunter Romance, human character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-05 23:06:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18838633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remnantof/pseuds/remnantof
Summary: Untethered by the death of his mentor, Lux makes a friend on the wrong side of town.  An examination of grief, trauma, and intimacy.  Original Guardian characters, see notes.





	I. No Gentle Place

**Author's Note:**

> Somewhere in 2015 I picked up Destiny, and jumped into making OCs with friends. I wrote a ton in Google Drive that I assumed no one else would really care to see, including this story in 2017. Having recently written a sequel, and started outlining a third story for this pairing, I decided to start posting it in case people just like Destiny fic in general, or just missed my writing.
> 
> Cael Lupei is a personal OC based on Destiny Canon. Pollux Tyndarid belongs to [Comptine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/comptine).
> 
> Stories hopefully can be read blind, but if you'd like a rundown on these characters, I've typed up a cheat sheet [here,](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T1JuXa73hQ_B8kbRkhruZjzXKhMlO6zHkILD8JA0Aqg/edit?usp=sharing) which may contain spoilers for future works.
> 
> For warnings: Cael is a Thanatonaut, which means he dies and resurrects as a Guardian to experience visions and visit the Ascendant Realm. He also engages in sex work, which is mostly alluded to and not outright depicted in the story. Both characters participate in consensual, recreational drug use, and some sex scenes happen when they're high, and some while they're sober. It is not explicitly discussed, and there is a scene where the lines could be considered blurry, but all sex outright depicted in the story is consensual. It is a complicated relationship between people who don't yet know what healthy really looks like, so YMMV with how messy is too messy.

> _But what_  
>  _do I do with all this leftover love?_  
>  _My hands were built for crawling on._  
>  _How do I write myself gently._  
>  _How do I not worship the shipwreck that_  
>  _stranded me here?_
> 
> — Sierra DeMulder

I.

_One for the road_ , the noble said. He pinched Cael at the cheeks and placed a pill against the obedient tongue. Winged marks pointed along his lines; framed the cheeks, fingers, pill. A teal flower on the purple meat of his tongue. Cael knelt on the velvet plush of the footstool, red-winged, bled to every curtain and accent of the chamber. Red on the white sheets, and upon waking, he had three small stripes specific to his jaw, to the noble's ring.

New Monarchy thanks you for your contribution.

He knelt on the plush of the footstool, bloom dissolving in the new spit of his mouth. The noble placed three fingers under his chin, and the dose solved the demand of pleasure after pain. The only bruise remaining was beneath the ring, crept between split knuckles.

Cael knelt on the plush of the footstool, dissolving out of his new body. No form could contain the whole of him, looking at the split on that hand. He bled out, living the ring on his jaw over, and over. He was on the footstool; on the bed; in the dream where the Hunter held her severed head and received the sacrament on its lolling tongue.

His rasping laugh was not out of sorts for the humor rooted in his veins. He entered as a field of scorched earth, the clients axes and plows, hacking to fertile ground. What obsessed them with the effort was beyond him — he knew how to take the seed, and stand up with guiding hands. He knew how to walk out of their lives as quietly as his old body had walked in.

It was easy, when he was not entirely there. Relaxed gaze and limbed, he could dance on the heads of pins, the last breaths rising from gutters; no one wanted to meet his eye in the daylit street. No one wanted to meet him in the night.

 _Make them uncomfortable_ , his father had said, with his atrophied legs and his battered chair. _Make them struggle with guilt to look at you, and you'll be invisible._ Then he'd told the true story of a cloak that could reflect the sky, and the trickster who used it to visit his love without her father knowing.

_Is that how I was made?_

How he had laughed. Cael fed Viera's glimmer into Piko and looked to the sky, between the cluttered angles of balconies and heavy eaves. Not a single star by which to navigate, his head splitting time like a fraying rope, bloom making his heart lift and ache. He covered his eyes with both hands, removed them, covered, removed — and every time the sky was empty, and every time Hanzi was not there.

 _You should not stay here,_ Piko warned, full of glimmer that wasn't his and restless from a recent rez. "Fuck off," he murmured, lifting an arm to trail slim fingers over old brick. One, two, three — he pricked the fifth with violet light, counted again. Crazy was its own mirrored cloak, a million glittering shards throwing the wealthy district back at itself: one of its bloody sacrifices had crawled from the gutter and scrawled proof of its passing on the foundations.

 _I hate you like this,_ she whispered, as he tipped his head to the night watch and tried to find his father's laugh in his own throat.

"I hate you on principle," he said, to the only part of him the drug could not touch. Her voice was an ugly thing slipped between his heartbeats; her weight was the space between his ribs, the center of his bones, marrow replaced with pure light. It made him light enough to blink along the alleys, to move through the night the way his mind skipped through time: his father's laugh, the smell of ozone, another's chains breaking under a sword — he snapped forward with their pulling weight. Forward, and up, until the Traveler loomed an ugly harvest moon. He lifted, fell slow to the opposite bank, was silhouette against a broken hull.

They had built a colony around a shipwreck, and he was always on its shore. Sand and dead trees, ashes and shells. Shale and moss tonight, gleaming wet under his sandals. The river was flush from heavy rains, a swollen strip of deeper dark that glimmered under city lights. If he walked into it, it would take him with no more effort than the wind gave a leaf. "I hate you," he repeated, the reflected lights of his eyes distant and blurry on the moving surface.

Anyway, his body said, snapping straight and turning to the alleys that opened at the shore. He stepped onto a ledge of stones above the river's highest possible edge, and walked along the wall with one hand out. His fingers trailed the wind, not-touching the broken surface, phantom selves walking down each opening to different mornings.

He went home, alone.  
He took a beating.  
He picked up a cheaper job, draining the light from a body, and walked away with a wallet.

The fourth alley gave him pause: he touched the walls on either side, drawing three steps into the narrow space without deciding. Wind off the river pushed him from behind, and his phantom self was singing, filling with a liquid, golden light.

"Cheer up," he told her. "We're going to make a friend."

-

As the story might be told, Lux could say: I felt him coming. Dawn was a precarious time, catching gold on the Traveler's frame and sparking in sharp flares against the grey of the sky. Grief was a precarious state of mind: Lux's hand was over the old rabbit's foot in his pocket, his thumb rubbing the fur — coarse with dirt and travel — soft again.

 _You're not a Hunter if you don't believe in luck,_ Andal had said, pushing the soft foot into his palm the first night they’d met. Lux had dropped the corner of his shirt, where he’d been rubbing the silver scar on his hip. An inch higher and he would have lived; an inch higher and he wouldn't have been there.

 _There is no such thing,_ Couru had countered, her voice deep and final from Andal's shoulder. He’d laughed, and cupped her to his cheek, gentle and indulgent of his harbinger eye.

Sides of a superstitious coin. Lux squeezed the foot, hand in one pocket; there was the phantom of a hand at his weaker hip, smooth and cold around his wallet. But his wallet was in his hand, exchanging glimmer for a bag of teal pills, and the hand was not real, and no amount of belief rubbed to the old fur had kept Andal in the world a moment longer.

He put the wallet in his other pocket, and the hand was under his, cold anticipation to the skin with fingers brushing over and between. The phantom closed its hand around his wallet, and bolted across the street. Lux swayed on his bad leg, the cold touch slowing him more than disbelief. He took three ragged breaths, blinking the morning haze something clearer, willing his leg to understand the desperation of being robbed. The dealer was already leaning back into his door, chuckling and counting glimmer chips — he’d gotten what he needed before the loss.

 _But you still have the charm,_ his mind rallied, fuzzy with its lack of sleep.

 _Why this phantom,_ the hole in his side agreed. Because — because: the sun slipped over the horizon and glowered along the edge of the crowd; his leg unlocked from his hip; the phantom laughed high and clear through the grey.

 _There is no such thing,_ Couru had said.

Because he was there, now. His boots beat the cobbles heavy as a tired horse, finding his own momentum and aiming it after — a laugh, a cold space that moved between the passerby and seemed to tell him, _this is the place your body will inhabit._ And the next, and the next, until it was easier for his senses to stop hunting the thief and retreat inward. Pollux Tyndarid knew how to aim and command a space, even when every impact rattled up his feet, his bones become fragile. The bag in his pocket would keep him from shattering.

His tether had snapped, and he had not left this ring of the city since — not to cross the swollen river and not to take the Tower lift back to his place in the sky. The cold trail told him what he already believed: his place was on the ground. He walked among mortals, and remembered his own death, and bought pills to forget.

He still had the pills. A lost wallet was not the end of his world; but the next cold sense of a body in space begged his moving through it. The mad thief cut a hole in the crowd for him to fill, and abandon, and fill again, until the chase was its own living thing, with a pulse that rose and died with the wrist caught in his hand.

Now Lux was the tether, snapping the phantom from halfway down the alley and reeling him in on his own momentum. He was struck again with a sense of _before._ The phantom twisted himself into Lux's space, pressed a sense of cold against his front; the small Awoken thief followed with a smile. He found his arm bracing around a slim body, with the thief tucked too-close. Lux let out his breath and licked the back of his teeth.

The eyes staring up at his were big, bright, widely dilated.

"Hi," Lux breathed. For a moment, the story was something else: he had caught the boy out of a fall, his free hand braced on Lux's chest. He was already using the movement of his trapped wrist to tap the wallet against Lux's squeezing fingers. 

"Hi," he returned through a smile. Wonder looked up upon wonder, looking down, and Lux felt a tug in his middle adjacent the corner of his mouth. The boy's smile was as glowing white and sharp as his eyes, lit up from a thin but shapely face; his dark hair was a pretty contrast to the strange blue of his skin, cold under Lux's hand.

Not cold enough, his grip reluctant to leave it as he slid his fingers up to retrieve his wallet. "I should kick your ass." His voice was half inside-out with breathless laughter. The arm Lux had around his waist tightened, testing the feel of one front pressed to another, and both of them smiling. Both of them precarious, half-lit, half-real, holding each other in a narrow space.

"You should keep your wallet in a different pocket," the thief replied. His voice was soft, syllables clipped through an accent that gave every letter a weight, and his mouth full of glittering, inhuman teeth. Lux sucked air between his own, seethed it back out, stowing the wallet with the rabbit's foot and setting his hand on a slim hip.

He was very solid, warming between Lux's arm and chest like smooth stone. His fingers walked up the folds of Lux’s jacket and — he felt the chill at the back of his neck before the hand cupped it. The rumble in his chest was automatic as the tilt of his head for a hand: this was the cold space his body meant to inhabit, dashing away from the dealer's stoop. This was where sunrise meant to find him, sagging his tired frame against a wall. "Thanks for the lesson," he huffed: "I don't know how I'll repay you."

A finger curled, one nail pressing just-so to his pulse. “Well, you already took money off the table.”

Pickpocketed, happily pinned. Lux felt the time spent chasing this moment lost, a gap that failed to measure how he got from Cayde's hand on his shoulder to — here. He shrugged an invisible weight and laughed, but it was not the ugly sound when denial had set in, or the oily sound of letting go. Coming, or going, or — he was in-between. He was came, not yet went, letting a thief into more than his pockets. He had plenty of pills. He had the old foot, luck rubbed off by a series of worried hands. He needed something else, a little more harbinger, a little more fate: "I can't tell if you're trying to make good of a bad situation, or you picked my pocket to try that line."

The thief arched pretty in his grip and plucked at the corner of his collar, shapely nails on the black spade pinned through the buttonhole "Depends; is it working?"

"No." Lux touched the line of his jaw, watched him lift for his hand. He angled cheek to palm like he was soaking up the warmth. Like the cold of his skin could thaw. When Lux touched a thumb to his lip, there was electricity under his skin, leaking from its thinnest parts.

Andal had been a bright, cracking light. Magnetic arc held in warm hands, ruffling his hair just to make it stand on end. Little sun, he’d said, and Lux had been too stupid not to hear it another way, to hang on every word and slot them five ways to six, building a tower of hope all the higher before it had come down. Struck by lightning. Lux impressed his thumb until the tongue dipped to touch it. Until the eyes hooded over their own glow, and he — 

Deep breath, wondering what it had been like. Even there, even then, his thumb kissed by a current and two bodies in one place: he imagined the cold space where a body was about to be — the space where it had been. When a person was just gone. Had he left glass in his final bootprint, had the air tasted of lightning? Would the shape of it have plugged the hole in his side, better than the bag of pills?

The alien tongue invited his thumb over a row of teeth, smooth on the way in and dangerous on the way out. His thief could bite into his flesh and never let go. When the phantom breathed him free of its teeth, and reality followed, cold fogged the air between them. Lux found his mouth dry. "No," he said, softer: "the line isn't working."

Lips curved under a wet thumb, darker and smeared with spit. "Come on then." He spun back out with Lux's arm, the aborted step of a dance, cold fingers in warm and the light of a new day rising in the streets.

-

The kiss, when it happened, was deep and many-flavored. It seemed the destination, more than the apartment, more than the couch. As they walked, their arms brushed their sleeves together in a conversation of fabric and fold, describing the kiss to the morning fog. Lux waited behind Cael at the door, a head taller, dipping to smell the saltwater musk that leaked from his scalp.

 _This is dangerous,_ Epsilon murmured from deep within his chest, but he had none of Couru's gravity, and Lux could not care. His hands crawled up Cael's back in the dark, in the chill of his space, the conversation continued without words. He tugged and tucked the easy curiosity just-inside the back of Cael's collar, the dark fabric sweeping wide on his narrow shoulders. The leaf of scar tissue on Lux's hip wanted to find its home on the tree of Cael's back, silver branches open-pored and catching dim light when he opened the door.

The apartment was warmer than the hall, a coiled heat-lamp diffusing the cold without drying the air. The floors were swept, the walls dimming with their years, and the greatest sources of clutter were piles of books, sheafs of paper, chipped mugs full of old leaves or ink pens. Hardly a thieves den, hardly a cushioned room behind a curtain. The coil hummed, paper moved on subtle drafts, and even in this quiet, they were telling the story of the kiss. He would breathe deep, let Cael slip from his grip. He would need another moment for his hip, adjusting to the new temperature, the density of wood after stone. Cael shrugged from a long grey coat, exposing his back again, dragging the collar of his shirt sideways over his shoulder. Lux was going to kiss that as well, and the thin arms swinging the heavy wool over a couch, and the fingers tucking tips to Cael's arms when he crossed them and turned around.

His slim silhouette, his easy posture, the inviting cant of his hips when he said, _you can put yours with mine,_ eased the brittle feeling of Lux's bones. He tugged the bag of pills from his pocket. Cael's hands found him as soon as he entered reach, weaving one of Lux's frayed edges into his own. Lux was not alone: he was not imagining the current that eased from Cael's skin, into the leather of his jacket, the gentle teasing of those hands turning out his pockets before pushing the weight of it from his shoulders.

He was not imagining the current of his own nerves, with no space to breathe or grow in the inevitable pull between them, and he was not imagining the curious exploration of Cael's hands, exposing his simple shirt. They were going to kiss, and more than — but the lines between his eyebrows, and the books still open on his table, and the tea: Lux caught his hand and placed the bag of pills on his palm. This was not a thing that often happened, here. This was not the space for it, for all gravity remade the space. Lux stood with his right side exposed to the heater, and could find no fault, nothing to deter the answering heat in his center. Cael stepped more immediately to him, plucked two pills from the bag, and tossed it onto their coats. The kiss hung heavy between them.

Bloom had a taste like pure spice, hit heavy as a darkness zone: every sense buckled under and narrowed, was acute and awful — as a positive. Alone, it might have trapped Lux in his sadness. In the scattered but swept apartment, it trapped him in Cael's bright laugh, the white of his teeth, the glow of his eyes. He had been cold and brittle, pressing the dose to Lux's tongue; when the floor dropped and he exhaled himself somewhere calmer, his sense of him blurred to a smear: dark hair white lights scarred lips narrow lines and a _heat._ The source and severity eluded him, confused by the drafty air of the room, but Lux could feel it in the same place he felt Epsilon.

Cael was close to his ear, hard fingers clutched in his collar to hold him down. Every push and pull sang in his veins; asked, now? Lux was alive because those hands required it, was awake because Cael needed him to lean in and _listen._ The words didn't matter, murmured with his electric lips just-touching the shell of Lux's ear. "How does that feel" required no answer but a shiver.

"Good," he answered anyway, to feel Cael hum agreement too-close. The scars on his mouth were patches of nothing, indents in the soft skin when he kissed Lux below his ear. His grip loosened, but Lux stayed low for the reward of his mouth, finding the folds of Cael's sleeves to clutch his want to.

The heater was adjacent to the couch; Lux's calves backed into it but he did not sit, waiting for slim hands to tell him what to do. Everything was an option with Cael's mouth over his pulse, the high just starting to even out from his head and reach the tips of his fingers, the curl of toes in his boots. He had stood at other couches, on other highs, with different hands searching him for a hold: Cael had surely pressed bloom to other tongues and steered the owners onto other surfaces, so that Lux could give himself to his hands without worry for the wonder in their light touch.

Surely.

Epsilon's warning was trampled by the fingers at his shoulder, rapping hard and pointed like a beak on the window. Lux turned his head to find them, but this was the trick: Cael took him by the chin, turned him to smiling eyes, as he tipped up to finally — finally start the kiss. Lux tested the softness of his mouth, nodding with him, yes, _yes_ , for the sweetness he tasted too. For the mutual drop in their stomachs that furrowed Cael's brow, made Lux steady himself with a grip on his thin arms. Cael mirrored him, smoothing his fingers down to cup him at the elbows, moving up on his toes to meet where Lux bowed his head.

Lux used his grip to drag him into it, nuzzling the electric hum below his jaw, until Cael was tipping his head back and his mouth open on a breath of sound. Until he was looping his arms around Lux's neck and shoulders, as he'd wanted him to, and it was the easiest thing to sit down while pulling Cael into his lap. He moved well: not the strange filling of a space Lux expected him to inhabit, but present, and predictive, so that he responded to Lux's cue in tandem with its being given. Lux sat, and in the same moment Cael tightened the arms around him to give Lux his weight, and both of them swung Cael to straddle him. The hems of his dark layers rode up from his knees, exposing shapely but scarred legs, and Lux dropped his hands to test the texture at the back of them. Cael hiccuped a sound into his mouth and shivered.

"Should I not?"

"Tickles," Cael said, with a wariness Lux took as a _yes_. He gathered the back of Cael's head in one hand and kissed him into the moment, until his eyes closed and his legs were spreading for every inch Lux hiked the garment up. There was the sweetness again, both of Cael's hands steadying on Lux's chest, pushing at the curves of muscle and digging in with his nails when Lux's hand made it up the textured back of his thigh to cup his ass. Cue and response: Cael was already sighing a mournful note into his mouth and arching for the hand that continued up his spine.

Solar heat seared through the fabric, moving Cael along its path, holding him at two decisive points to keep him in Lux's lap. He opened his mouth with a long hum for the drop and drag of his high hitting the next mark, catching him up and making him moan in sympathy for the way Cael melted under his hands. When he shifted his mouth to Cael's throat, he was more silk than his worn clothes, a thing that dropped and pooled in his grip. His breath was humid in Lux's hair, his body flushing warmer under his hands, and Lux tugged at the wide collar to finally get his mouth on the exposed shoulder. They were easy clothes, tied at the highest part of Cael's waist and now hanging bunched and billowed against Lux's stomach.

"What do you want," he asked, hands warm and ready, spasming between grip and release on Cael's neck and arm. This too struck him as — not the wrong thing, but a thing to pull Cael from the moment. A sudden draft, and the silk drifted, up and away. He caught it , gathered and folded it in his hand, held it at Cael's side and leaned in to test the flat of his tongue on the texture of his scarred back.

Nothing: he scraped his bottom teeth after, and Cael twitched his shoulder, butted his head sideways in soft reproach. "I'm not picky," Lux amended, smoothing his hand over the soft hair at the back of Cael's head.

He was small enough, skin stretched on a narrow frame, to be inherently precious in Lux's hands. He was resilient enough that his scars resembled a clinging ivy, tragedy a point from which he grew. Cael said, "Anything is fine," and caught Lux's mouth with his own. Neither of them had taken the other's hand, or walked the short distance to this place, to sit on a couch and talk.

Lux stopped worrying.

When he gathered Cael at the ends of his spine and shifted, Cael pinched his arms and waist to comply. When he pinned him to the couch, his head on their coats and his body exposed to the waist, Cael clipped his teeth shut on a satisfied tangle of noise. It was easy again, to seek the electric heat in his mouth, to use a finger on each hand to drag tight, dark shorts off his hips and leave them hanging from a brittle-looking ankle. Everything was serendipity on bloom: Cael fit perfectly in his hands, the back of his head, the width of his sides, the angles of his hips. Cael responded perfectly to his mouth, scraping his strange teeth against his lips, gasping soft sounds between them, clawing his nails in Lux's hair and over his back. They would be a matching set, with red and silver lines on pink and blue skin, and Lux wanted to find the seam to split him open and crawl inside.

Cael inverted his claws and tugged the shirt over Lux's head. Old style tags flashed and rattled, and he caught those in his hand, biting the chain to the back of Lux's neck and pulling him in.

The walk to the apartment, the soft touches between, had told the story of the kiss: now they told the story of what came next. Cael described the ways he would take Lux apart with his writer's callus scraping the shell of his ear; with the gentle bite and tug of his teeth on Lux's bottom lip; with his nails just-so to Lux's throat, a presence at his pulse. He had all the allure of a deep sea creature, and Lux dragged his hips down, moaning low and long, needing to be devoured. Cael gasped for the rough texture of his trousers against the naked length of him, and bit down on lips too close to his teeth. Lux felt blood well hot and drip from the cut, saw it fill the indents of scars on Cael's lips, pool and outline the edges of his teeth, and flushed to the roots of his hair.

Both of them stared, breathing hard. Cael had described the ways he would take Lux apart, and Lux was open-mouthed, licking his bloodied lip, panting and hard for it. Yes, his body said; yes, Cael's answered, after it processed a soft shock for the power it had found.

Serendipity was a faster, harder thing after that.

Cael fit a hand to his thick hair and licked his way back into Lux's groaning mouth; Cael reached between them for the catch of Lux's pants and kicked the black shorts from his ankle. His electric skin was hot now, charging Lux until he thrummed with weighty need. He reached back to help Cael push his open pants down, the elastic of his underwear catching on his ass, making him shiver to be half-exposed. Cael tugged from the front, until Lux's cock swung free on its heavy arc, decided it was good enough for now and dragged him down to rut.

Lux released an explosive sound from the back of his throat, then a messy whine, which rose and broke at its peak. Cael was hard and pushing against his weight, and it was awful, too dry, the folds of their remaining clothes biting their skin above and below. Cael dragged Lux's hand up and licked his palm, heedless and — it wouldn't be enough. It wasn't, when Lux shoved down to grip them both. It wasn't enough, and his hips kept moving regardless, and Cael bit his own lip until an oily substance washed Lux's blood from his teeth and Lux nudged his head to take it out on his shoulder instead.

"Oh," he said, almost a question. "Oh _shit_ ," was the answer, his balls tightening and a coil of heat releasing in his stomach for how good it hurt, those back-winged teeth dug into the meat of his shoulder. Blood and saliva leaked over his skin, and Cael moaned, made helpless sounds through his nose and tightened his grip until his jaw stood out under Lux's wondering fingers.

He was leaking on them both, little spurts on Cael's stomach; he ran his fingers through and worked it down their lengths; it still wasn't enough, to make the slide easy and wet, but there was something good about the stripping heat of every stroke. He lifted his hand, he spat, he tried again; again; it was stupid and disgusting and Cael was whining into his shoulder, shredding it in his teeth. Blood bubbled on a breath and popped from the corner of his mouth, softly splattering them both. Bloom convinced Lux he could feel every drop, soft as a petal between fingers, tiny as the point of a pin.

It was not what they had described with their wandering hands and wet mouths. It was another story, an older one, an echo to be weathered before new ground could be tread. Lux found a smaller scar on the corner of Cael's jaw and set his teeth on it, sucking a bruise that would show the small lines in stark relief. Cael twisted his head like a bucking animal, rending the wounds in Lux's shoulder sideways, and found the strength to bite him harder when he came.

Lux sank into the mess of him, pinning him to the coats by the mouth still gasping and groaning into the meat of his shoulder. His arm was a tingle of nerves unsure of their origin, a buckling pillar that drove him down and strew him desperate and fucking his shipwrecked body on the rocks of Cael’s. He gave a choking cry into the folds of his own jacket. He bit a length of Cael’s hair. He breathed in through his nose, and back out, and hissed for the sensation of Cael’s teeth retracting from his skin. He bled onto a blue cheek and the bag of teal pills. Cael licked it from his lips, eyes alight again, wide and staring at Lux like he couldn’t believe even his solid weight, or the coppery taste of him in his mouth. Like he couldn’t believe his luck.

 _There is no such thing._ Epsilon’s bright eye met Cael’s, drew his blue light over blue skin in a perfunctory assessment, and he rolled his points swimming sideways to reach the bleeding ring on Lux’s shoulder. “This could scar,” he huffed, light weaving the broken blood vessels whole, knitting the skin together.

“I hope it does,” Lux said, sinking his weight onto Cael. He found the mark on his jaw and pressed another wet kiss to darken the color. The scar left in white relief was familiar, begging recognition in its three short lines.

Cael turned his head, his smile slow and red-rimmed, and licked his teeth. The fact of Epsilon had his knees raising, his hips shifting to wrap his legs around Lux at the waist and keep him close. “I have supplies in the bathroom, if you’re up for it.”

Epsilon dropped along the trail of his arm and rolled under the couch with a series of affronted beeps. Lux pushed up with his fingers on the floor, testing the slide of his body against the mess on Cael’s stomach. One smile hitched for a breath of sound, and the other grew for it, until they were bloom-and-fuck-happy: laughing at each other and bracing for a second round of half-clothed, lazy friction on the couch. Supplies could wait, and the bag of pills was within reach, and they were still glowing at the peak of the first high.

Lux kissed the copper taste from Cael’s mouth. He’d never listened to Couru anyway.

  


* * *

II.

On the fourth day, Viera sent the details of another job. She praised the satisfaction of his last client in the message: asking, without being gauche enough to ask, where the fuck her money was.

Cael picked one of Lux’s shirts out of the pile Epsilon had left over the back of his couch. Lux opened one eye, said _that’s mine_ as Cael pulled it on. “So are those,” when Cael rooted around in his trouser pockets for the pack of cigarettes and rattled the case to hear the lighter still inside. Lux arched up off the cushions, stretched his arms over his head, and rolled onto his side to hide his face in the folds of Cael’s coat. He fit the shirt like a scarecrow: it hung from his frame when he bent to kiss the shell of Lux’s ear.

“Go,” Lux groaned, pushing at his face. “You’ve looted me clean, enjoy your spoils.” Cael smiled against the hand pressing his mouth up and away, drew it hand in hand from his face, squeezed.

The sun was low over the rooftops, dragging long shadows across the balcony. When the door closed, Cael’s cut off the floor and broke across panes of glass: he was reframed, splintered in precise squares — one told Viera to throw his contract in the river; one took the job and made excuses; one ignored the message and needled Lux until he took them back to bed.

As a whole, he told Piko to say he was busy this week, and curled up to light a cigarette in the sanctuary of his folded limbs. He leaned his head back against the doors and exhaled smoke into the sunset; he did not imagine the gold light catching the thickest plume, or pretend he had imagined it. Smoke sucked ugly between his teeth, a second shot to the throat, and he coughed weakly before he could stuff the lighter back in the box. Before he could hold a hand over his eyes and remember his training, this side of sober and flushing with that old, warm light. The price of proximity, he assumed: maybe he was just an approximation of a person. Maybe he had been cold because she was cold, and was warm because Lux was warm. Maybe the next person would wake up lightning under his skin, and his body would finally drift apart from the strain, ashes to fucking ashes.

Piko gave a distressed whistle, a kettle blowing steam at the back of his neck. She dug her points and their connection flickered. A flame plumed from the white char over hot coals, and when he breathed himself closer to even, closer to void, it died. Piko’s weight disappeared with her voice.

In her stead, Janus pushed the better of her heads against his hip, opening the other to yowl a complaint for the chill he was casting to the air. Cael shivered a laugh free of his teeth and held the cigarette with his lips rolled in, picking her up to sit in his lap. Her purring weight warmed him closer to the center, where he wasn’t broken or unbroken at all: just a body, with a beating heart, smoking in the evening. It made the thick scars on his calves itch, to let his nerves register the touch of the air, the touch of the cat kneading her paws into his thighs. Drool dragged from her second mouth and soaked into his arm, and he cradled her heads under his hand, kissing her between the ears.

Lux hadn’t asked, for all he had mapped his hands over the old tissue. Up his legs and over his sides, heavy on his calves and back. When he pawed through the books on the table and chairs, tidying piles and cleaning up the mugs strewn among them — Cael had seen him drag a finger under single lines of his handwriting, then flip them closed. He only skimmed in earnest the old publications.

It made a kind of sense — a delicate symmetry of no one asking, _why were you in the street that morning? Why haven’t you left?_

In the future where Cael took the job, he didn’t need an excuse. He told Lux he was going out, and did not know if he would be back before morning. Lux kept dozing on the couch, and when he came back, the rooms were tidier than before, but not empty. It had only been four days; they did not need to know.

Janus chirped, and pushed the join of her heads against his chin. He rubbed the soft fur under and over her ribs, gathered her up as a limp doll, and let her rumble against his throat. His calves itched, starting to stiffen and cramp: the skin never quite what it used to be. The routines were falling apart — Viera’s payment, the journals, the careful habits that kept his legs soft enough to bend and stretch. Instead, there was the dry scrape of old bloom on his teeth, the hollow of his stomach plugged with pan fried eggs and toast. Instead there was the soft weight of sex, performed in and on his body, and the harder weight of wearing his body after, almost five days in a row. Janus scraped her scent to his jaw; Cael stubbed his cigarette on the balcony, in a black mark where other cigarettes had been stubbed. He pressed his palm to the mark, a ring of ash on his Warlock symbol. He could only wipe one of them out.

This wasn't like a job. This wasn't like Calliope. He could keep Lux's sweat on his skin, if he wanted. He could keep his skin on his bones.

The cat rubbed over his ribs as he stood, her body arched and following through the open door. Lux was where he left him, turning over to watch him enter the room. A volume of Golden Age poetry was open over his chest, its hard cover a ridge of armor, and Cael noticed for the first time with his eyes the rings on his fingers: a simple band, another spade, a triangle made with three lines and a ruby. He took them off, sometimes, to leave on the table next to the bed. Cael had listened to them rattle in the dark; Lux had rolled over, fit bare hands to his hips and tugged him flush to a warm chest. Had nuzzled the back of his head, yawned hugely, murmured about wanting sleep until it had taken him.

Three nights in a row, a pair of gentle hands stripped of even incidental chill or hurt.

Cael stretched in his shirt: let it ride up his legs, let Lux see them with the sun setting behind. His calves were heavy and hard, protesting the stretch of his skin over its frame. When his arms dropped the light hit Lux in the face, and Janus wandered toward the couch, and Cael split from her to drag his protesting hide to the bedroom. The balm was open on the bedside table, put to another use, and he caught the edge with two fingers to drag the wide container across the sheets. The cap sat with several teal flowers crushed to seafoam, whorls drawn by fingers in the powder. Cael considered with a dry pinky, drawing a new shape, but shook it clean before scooping the cool lotion onto three fingers and working it into the back of his protesting knee.

He ignored the sound of Lux's footsteps, echoing with the sound of the door closing on Janus, with rings rattling on the nightstand. Lux was only in the door, his finger marking a page in the book held at his hip. Cael kept his eyes on the single stripe of hair that ran down from his knee, where he had been kneeling on the floor, and dead before the fire warped the flesh. The lotion smelled of oranges and heavy leaves, to soften his patchwork skin. Lux remained the wildcard — not asking, not looking away. He had fucked Cael down into his old couch on the first morning, holding both rough calves in his palms. He had sighed the salt water sweat that lingered in Cael's hair, and the ugly musk of his own spit on Cael's throat, and exhaled: _you smell so good._ The door closed, and Cael did not look up until Lux was at the edge of the bed, taking his rings off and setting them quietly atop the closed book.

His place was lost, and he was reaching for the jar: "Do you want some help?"

Cael's fingers went still on the back of his leg, tacky and cold where the lotion could not settle on the top of his skin. It had to be worked in with firm strokes, over and over, by patience learned of necessity, and four years of his hands testing and trying to make supple what wanted to atrophy. But Lux was standing over him, after four days, both of them sober and neither of them reaching for the crushed pills. But Lux had taken off his rings, and was not moving toward him in the interim between the question and — Cael had no reason to tell him no.

He wanted to; he didn't. He didn't know.

"It's fine," they both said. They both stared. Cael went to his elbows on the bed and held out an ankle for Lux's hands. His pulse kept steady and he could look away, at any time, from Lux's hands working up from the pad of his heel. Gentle hands, without metal to catch, or press cold to the skin. Just warm, and firm, and familiar after four days on one iteration of Cael's skin. An iteration that had known no other touch — just three fingers under the chin, and a pinch on his cheeks. The memory made it crawl, and Cael's arms shook under his simple weight. Lux smiled, and told him to lay back. "Let me," he said, working up behind Cael's shin, the heat of his touch pressing through the thick knot of tissue on the top curve of Cael's calf. The penetrating touch did not lack intent — Lux could not seem to hover the pad of his fingers over the hairs standing up from Cael's skin, and not incite a deeper touch, a deeper heat. Lux could not touch him, even sober, and not invite a response.

Cael settled his upper back on the sheets and used the weight to counter a shift of his hips; Lux hummed and dug his thumbs into his calf. They both reeked of oranges and aloe, cigarettes, saltwater. Lifting his other leg, Cael threaded this touch to the rest, hooking it around Lux to invite him between his legs. Lux smiled and split his hands to work them up Cael's thighs.

The moment made more sense with Cael panting quietly under a weight, his shoulders lit up and his hips rolling. When he tried to lift, Lux fit both hands over his thighs and pushed, so the momentum rolled up his spine, carried itself out in a wounded: _shit._ Still pressing down, Lux dragged his hands up, slicking and smoothing Cael's thighs to the hip. He reached for the jar and worked his hands over the inset, the scarred backs, under Cael's body to grip and barely lift his ass in both hands. Cael sucked a breath between his teeth and did not beg; Lux would finish when he finished, or Cael's body would push itself through a climax when the tension reached its peak. It did not matter what road Lux took to get there. Only that his hands kept moving, and finding places to touch. Only that Cael could not focus on the itch or stiffness of his calves, with Lux rubbing a slick hand over his abdomen, tight circles just above his cock.

Lux stood in the ring of his shaking legs, mouth open as he looked down; Cael was flushed and hard, his hands clutching and releasing a fold of the sheets. His middle was quivering, and he held a series of sounds in his throat while his marks burned on his shoulders. Look at me, he was trying to say, though Lux always did: I can be so good; I want to be good — and he wanted most of all to trust the hands pinning him down and working him up.

"I know," Lux said, and again, leaning in to swallow every gasp and sigh. He dragged his mouth down, and Cael was nearly undone, hot pressure over the implant in his throat. It locked him in the present, in the moment of Lux pinning him at his throat and stomach, until he turned his head to the side and surprised himself with a long, heedless moan.

"Good," Lux murmured, drawing his mouth down Cael's sternum and sideways, down, between his ribs to his shivering stomach. He found the soft parts of his narrow body, and whispered soft praise between hard pricks of his mouth sucking bruises to the flesh. Cael wanted to kick him; Cael wanted to cry; Cael drove his heels into Lux's back and his hips against his hand, gaining one rough stroke against his chest and letting his held breath explode from his throat. Lux laughed and shifted his hand down, aiming Cael along the hot hollow of his collar, then against his chin: "I love how you sound, don't hold back — " before he sank down on Cael's cock in a fluid hum that touched his nose to the twitching muscle at his base. A tug at his hip was all the permission he needed, to tangle his hand in Lux's hair and fuck the back of his throat.

After the relief of several quick thrusts, he shook himself gentler, eased down and found a second hold on the hair at the back of Lux's head: shorter and thicker and better to tug on with all of his fingers. Lux groaned against him, leaking from his eyes and nose, his hands still working slick lotion into the backs of Cael's thighs. Cael gave a high sound from the back of his throat, all sighs and sweet sharp breaths, teasing himself against the wet heat of Lux's mouth. It was strange to have the time, the permission, the enthusiasm — to tease and test himself on another body. It was the best feeling this skin had experienced yet, the slow build, how hot his body could get, how much it could shake and still somehow hold. When it took him, his climax was low and hard, so urgent and sudden that he had no warning to offer; Lux sank and aimed it down his throat, swallowing until the inevitable choke.

He pulled out of Cael's hands and off his still-dripping cock in a series of rough coughs; any guilt was erased by the flush on Lux's face, the tilt of his mouth around ragged breaths. When he crawled up onto the bed, his pupils were blown in his dark eyes, and his own hardness swung between his legs. Cael turned boneless onto his side and presented the slippery meeting of his thighs, letting Lux drape and clutch around his body and fuck himself between them. He bit his need to the back of Cael's shoulder and coughed several more times, locking an arm at Cael's waist to hold them flush and driving himself hot and hard against slick and sensitive skin. It wouldn't be long until Cael was choking to match him, trapped in his skin for another night and begging Lux to sweat him out.

“Just like that,” he gasped, letting the friction between his thighs drive him free of pleasant fog. “That’s perfect, you’re perfect, please — ” Lux groaned and hid his face in the first dip of Cael’s spine, kissing humid skin when his mouth could remember to do anything but hang open on a noise.

It was so warm, prickling and feverish in Lux’s grip; Cael put his arms over the arms at his waist like he couldn’t get enough, all of him loose and pliant again, made soft for Lux’s body. Made warm and slick, until it was the easiest thing to soak him up and take him inside. When he sucked in a breath and his thighs trembled, Lux’s desperate weight reaching through the blunted scars on his skin, Lux shifted them over; his hand slid between Cael’s legs opposite his thrusts, and he pulled him off in short strokes, weighting him down into the bed.

Cael reached back to dig his nails into Lux’s hips, open-mouthed and whispering praise into a puddle of his own spit. An incisor hooked on the sheet and he pulled it, bit the fold and gave himself over to the feeling, to the immutable heat that sat in his center and would not be pushed back for long.

-

It was neither of them first to call the retreat: sometimes Cael pushed with both arms against the sheets to shift the warm weight from his back; sometimes it was Lux rubbed raw and needing a piss, fighting the hands trying to drag him over for one more go. Sometimes Cael closed his teeth to Lux's searching kiss and sometimes Lux needed — five minutes in his own personal space, coming down from his high and catching his breath. 

He suspected Cael needed it more, was afraid to be the one always asking or rolling away. When Lux left him alone and came back, he was colder, his muscles going stiff. Maybe that was why they kept falling into each other — every time they stopped, every time Cael crawled away long enough to curl in on himself and look lost in his own apartment, or prodded a bruise Lux had sucked to his collar, or pinched his brows wary and wounded — Lux ached with a need to do something about it. Lux was half smitten with the shape of him. With his elegant hands, scarred the way his mother's had been, from thorns and needles. Certainly not from the pages of books or the tips of pens. He was smitten with the soft surprise Cael had for any gentle touch, the way he could be teased, patient and aching, until he came apart.

Lux lit a cigarette and breathed deep, staring up at white clouds against a bright blue sky. He had come out to the balcony to cool down: not consider how next he might climb on top of his favorite distraction. His hands crushed and unclenched from the dwindling pack, wanting their hold on narrow hips, to pin two wrists with one set of fingers.

They had just come off a spectacular morning; he breathed deeper and blew smoke, shifting for a better way to sit on the hard floor. Birdsong and a bustling street eased his mind free of the clinging memory, the image of Cael pinned to the sheets while Lux kissed the start of the strange marks on his arms, up to their soft dawn light on his shoulders. He wasn't like Lux at all, he'd come to realize, neither bright nor brittle nor responsive to pain. Perhaps at one point they had both been star-lashed boys blinking one to the other in the dark. Perhaps that morning they had both needed a pill and an easy fuck and — to laugh, at anything, with anyone. Now Cael was both phantom and thief, retreating into himself so he had to be coaxed, and melted, and held on to in the present. Now Lux was smiling around a cigarette and letting the ugliest cat he had ever seen climb his lap to nip him on the chin: happily possessed, happily coaxing its owner out again and again.

The cat wasn't so bad: it was like Cael, a complicated-looking thing that really wasn't, that just wanted to be touched. Lux gathered Janus up to rub soft fur on his own scruff and enjoy the simple pleasure of a warm animal, easily pleased and willing to show it.

"I'm glad you two are getting along."

It was neither of them first to seek the other out: if Cael had lingered in his bath, Lux would have left the balcony to join him. They would have made another go of it in the cooling water, pulled the plug and Lux might have had him in the strange violet light of jars stowed at the corners of the small room. It seemed a secret, personal place: more so than the bedroom. It was the dark ink scrawled on loose pages, that Lux turned over under steady hands when his eyes skimmed too far along. He wouldn't ask what the jars were for any more than he would ask the significance of the name _Calliope_ , and hadn't expected to spend much time in the chilly space. It had been Cael's soft question, his softer follow-through, to say _wash up with me_ when he returned from his own short retreat the night before.

He had stood in the doorway of the bedroom, as he stood in the doorway of the balcony now. He had put on Lux's cracked leather jacket and stuffed his hands in the pockets, looked at his feet and — maybe he was complicated, a thing with more than one head trying to appease a single heart. Maybe at some point, Lux would have to ask if they could keep this up, and what it might have to become when they couldn't. Last night he'd had only to say yes, and enjoy the way Cael seemed like a smaller, more attainable thing in his clothes. Last night he'd had only to ease gratefully into the drawn bath, and watch Cael drop his jacket on the tile but climb over him in a long dark shirt, that stuck to his skin in the water and weighted him down against Lux's chest. He'd kissed the breath free of Cael's throat from the back of it, and eased his hands under the heavy hem to jerk him off without asking anything in return.

Now Cael was in a similar shirt, his hair wet and tucked behind his ears. He only seemed to trim it on one side, so that the other grew in a thick curtain over his face, not quite touching his jaw. One side open, one side closed, and Lux smiled up at them both. "I like animals; even the weird ones."

Sobriety sat on Cael a bit heavier than most: he retreated inward, and took deep, tired breaths. He smiled as if the stiffness in his legs had climbed to his face. Open and closed, hot and cold. He didn't fuck like he was running on fumes, but sometimes he went away and had to be invited back. Sometimes he settled under Lux's weight and was asleep between one breath and the next. Lux watched him disengage like the door was a better support than his own spine, and dragged deep from his cigarette: he wasn't going to start something no matter how hot Cael's skin got under his hands.

Cael took an audible breath through his nose and eased down to sit beside Lux. His long shirt slid up to show the edge of dark shorts, and he blew the breath back out leaning into Lux's side. It was easy and automatic, to put an arm around him and draw his head onto his shoulder; it was easy, and less automatic, to shift the cat in his other hand and realize she had drooled on his collar.

"Ugh." Lux gave her to Cael's awaiting arms. His elegant hands tested the limits of fur and bone, smoothing over thin ribs and sorting out the tangles in her tail. She arched against his chest and turned three times on his thighs, butting her head against his arm, drool soaking down her throat from her second mouth as he bent to kiss her joined heads.

"She wasn't supposed to live," Cael said, warming between his own affection and the weight of Lux's arm over his back and side. "When she did, no one wanted her. They threw rocks or water if she came to the door. I take care of her now."

Lux ruffled the hand at Cael's head up through his damp hair, kissing the bristled patch on its other side. "Soft spot for strays?"

Cael lifted his head, one hand still holding Janus to his chest, her contentment rumbling through them both. "She was purring when I picked her up, after all that. She just wanted to be loved."

"Lucky she came to you, then."

Their foreheads dropped together, Lux setting aside his cigarette and stubbing it out for the kiss. Cael murmured _I guess so_ against his lips, soft and warm again, but no less tired. Another version to come back to, and nothing in Lux wanted to peel it away and break him apart. In a way they were meeting all over again, more than a day off the pills and not — tired of each other, but ready to describe something else with their bodies brushing together, with their lips meeting, with Cael's teeth dragging sleep-clumsy on Lux's lip before a great yawn.

Lux tucked him in against his neck and leaned his weight into Cael, who leaned counter with his legs strewn over Lux's lap. Gripping him at the knee, Lux held him loosely, his fingers easing over warm skin as they dozed in the afternoon sun.

  


* * *

III.

The way the story would be told, in Cael's own hand: he felt him going. Each day would begin, with or without pills; past and present were a hammer and chisel splitting him into two iterations of himself. The one that blinked forward, away, moved on. Another, rooted to the moment, with sapling fingers and gentle green shoots catching Lux at the edges. Another who asked him not to go.

The way the story would be told, in Cael's own hand: _nothing which happens beneath the Traveler does not echo on the distant shore._ His contacts in the faction would send their questions — _what has this to do with the Garden; do you speak of the Shores of Time; what fun it must be, to write unburdened by proof._ He would mail them a handful of sand and a piece of sea glass, swept up from his bathroom floor. They would draw their own conclusions, and he would stare at himself in the bathroom's mirror, trying to understand his own choice.

Presently, he took the pills to ignore the split. Presently, he was newly acquainted with the Cult, and only learning the rules of the shore between sleep and death — dreams and the Garden. The black sand he would gather against their doubt was only beginning to creep up the shore, dragged in on the waves and soaked into the white grains that came before. The silver corpses of trees were fewer, laid across and between a series of trapping dunes; the sky shone with harsh but constant light; the waves rolled deep and teal as raw spirit bloom, a golden spark of light glimmering in the foam. Cael felt smaller on the shore, as if the journey from the deeper sea eroded his edges. His scar tissue was roughed away, until his skin stretched open wounds. Oiled blood ran down his legs, and the black sand seeped in his wake, stood out his footprints from the tide line, dragged the infection of his nightmare along its physical path.

He felt smaller, but somehow more himself. Without any pretense of _bearing it_ , his feet dragging in their steps, his hair limp and tangled by saltwater, his clothes hanging off a bleeding frame. When he slid down the side of the first dune, sand grit in the opened flesh of his legs, staining black, and the welts of his palms dragged the stain where he put them down to slow his fall. Flames kindled blue on the black pitch, tipping violet where they touched the chill he pushed out of his skin, trying to repel them.

Because he was himself, without pretense, he was allowed to trip backwards from the flames with an audible cry. He was allowed to turn over and crawl up the opposite side of the dune, fistfulls of dead grass and black sand, fleeing a grave whisper on the breeze: _oh fire mine, there is so much work to do._

Cael rolled his weeping body onto the crest between the dunes, felt the sand shift and when he tipped and slid into the next shallow dip, the dead grass was their fingers, with their rings catching the light, scraping his weak skin and painting bruises where the flesh did not simply slough off. He moaned, terror an ache in his gut, to see their hands rise from the sand and pull the dead skin into hidden maws. The sound whined in his throat, choked on the desire to be sick, and dragged the tide higher on the shore. _Wake up,_ he begged, gripping the branches of a fallen tree to pull himself out of the sand. _Wake up_ , with his damp shirt hanging from his rotting frame, a strip of it tearing, its end disappearing into a hole at the bottom of the dune that glittered with blunt, human teeth.

He did not yet know the limits of the space, which was to say — he had not set any. He had not separated his deaths at their hands from his dreams of those deaths, had not erased their echoes from the body he put on to walk out their doors with the rising sun. He had not listened to the whispering voice in several weeks, or held himself down in the bath to enter its domain. He had let himself fall apart, so that the hands clawed their way up through a strata of crushed bloom, and the fire found ugly pitch in his center on which to catch, and the men stood waiting at the forest's edge with yellow, wolven eyes.

Pulling every loose end of himself in close, huddled on the island of the dead tree, he surveyed the wreck of the space. _A garden must be tended_ , the voice whispered; _oh child mine, why do you plant these seeds within yourself?_

Cael lifted his head, his face freshly bruised and throbbing with a steady ache. He went to them a stretch of barren earth, of sand and dead trees, and they cut their way to dark soil. The men were saplings taken root at the edge of the wood, where they would howl and snarl, struggling to grow before he learned to pull them down and strand them on the beach. The hands were a harvest of hardy grass and flowers, with familiar rubies glittering at their centers. White and blue digits split the sand in a growing rash, trapping him on the dead tree, spreading black ichor from taunting mouths: _you like that, don't you; tell me how good it feels; tell me how much it hurts_ — 

The fire caught the pitch between them, and the mouths began to scream, ugly and familiar. Cael buried his face in his knees, covered his head with both arms, and sank forward until his head touched the stripped surface of the trunk. His pulse was a steady and growing litany of _no, no, no;_ his voice was constricting in his throat, trying to release. The flames leapt higher, razing the fleshy growth from the sand, covering the black pitch in soft, white ash — they were brighter, and slow-moving, as if warm hands were easing the weeds out by their roots before tossing them on the fire. A shadow cut across the dune from its edge, the figure catching the harsh sun and laying a shadow of a hand on Cael's shoulder before hesitating to set his actual hand to it.

Cael did not have to look, to know it would be Lux. He released a sobbing sound from the dry terror in his throat, and _no_ became _not you too_ , moaned between them as arms tucked under his own and pulled him to the solid chest. He was still curled on himself like a child, like an animal lifted with a stick — and Lux staggered back on the sloping wall of sand, slipped, expelled a choked breath when they landed with all of Cael’s stiff weight driving down.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he whispered. His voice was waves on sand, grain against grain, the soft puff of ash dissolving back down around them when he dared open his eyes. Lux was a slab of terror reflecting his own, trapped in the same sights without their context, and Cael could not offer it.

 _This one will burn bright, this one is welcome_ — 

A breath could hurt, sucked wrong between his teeth and jarring the closing tissue of his windpipe. “No,” he said aloud; and, “wake up, _wake him up_ — ” His hand gripped the collar of Lux’s shirt and shook him by it: he had been an idiot to think he could hide one thing from the other. This was the reason to be empty, and cold; this was the reason to split out of his skin and build another, so he could not retain so much of the past with the present, let it crash into and erode the future.

“Wake up, please wake up;” he could not muster the strength to pull himself from the nightmare, but the tears leaking from Lux’s wide eyes were more terrifying than any number of hands, or any number of mouths. He imagined Lux sinking into the ash, into the sand, until only his teeth showed, agape in incomprehension — and in imagining it he made it so, his weight shifting as the wind dragged new sand down the side of the dune and began to cover him. Lux opened his mouth without sound, and Cael made it for him; a choking cry as he panicked and dug at the white ash.

He lifted Lux by the ears, though he resisted being clutched to the weeping skin of Cael’s chest. Oily blood soaked the front of his shirt, was sticky-cold on both of their skin when he hugged Lux close and summoned the cold sea.

It started with a hiss, no louder than Lux’s panicked breathing through his wet shirt. Water dragging higher on the sand, in waves that came and went with Cael’s pulse. It pulled back, and back, until the shore stretched long and wet from the crest of the dunes; until the white rocks and dead branches were revealed as great spines, and ribs, and the articulated bones of a great wing — then with a rising roar the ocean tore inward and crashed over the sand, struck two bodies apart and stung every festering scrap of Cael’s flesh.

-

When Lux woke, the rain dragging over the windows and distant thunder jarred, as if he had not fallen asleep to it, as if he had not been gently aware of it for the last few hours. How could the soft rumble drag him so thoroughly from what felt like the blackest depths of sleep? How could the room pitch and swell with the rhythm of that sleep, and still toss him abruptly on the white shore of the sheets? He dragged a hand through his hair and groaned, on the edge of another deep and dreamless plummet — but the thunder growled, and the rain begged him with every drop to open his eyes and remember.

Remember what?

The phantom sense hung in the room, drew him to Cael. Nothing about him, nothing he had done — but the fact of him. Lux grit his teeth and held the pillow firmly over his face, only just able to breathe, and prodded the feeling like a loose tooth. He had been asleep, and he had woken up. There was a coil of heat in his stomach, less like the anticipation of waking up next to Cael and more like the heating lamp transplanted in his guts. More like the hot grief of waking up and remembering, between the pills and between instances of Cael's hands on him, that Andal was gone.

Something had been in his grasp. He had gone behind the curtain, and he had put hands to the second of Cael's faces. He dragged them up to his face, pushing the pillow high enough to suck a cooler bit of air between his teeth — expecting them somehow wet, and tasting of salt. Expecting like the false end of a dream for the beginning to echo on, for something to flicker in his memory and tell him what he had lost. It wasn't that he could remember Cael, exactly — only a desire to help, only a sense that someone had been hurt, and he had wanted to do something about it, in a way he hadn't since he’d stopped taking his brother's calls.

Maybe he had been dreaming of Cas. The one where they traded places, and Lux couldn't keep it straight: was he the guardian or the general, the heir or the spare, was he feeling Dareus' ring on his cheek or was he watching it strike him from the outside? Was he watching it strike his brother? Was Epsilon leaving him to tend that other face, while he bled out on the ground and no one even called his name?

Another breath, colder, stinging his teeth. The room was icy beyond the blankets, a balm on the skin Lux was trying to sweat off. He was awake, and it had not been that dream — but the feeling lingered. He was overflowing with the irrational need to see Cael's face, to see that he had no cut on his cheek.

The rain hit home and dragged down the walls of the building, sheeting its chorus on every side of the room. The balcony doors rattled under the onslaught, clattered for the wind, held. Lux took a deep breath, and did the same.

It was strange, amid all the other strangeness, to wake up alone on the side of the bed. Cael was curled with his spine showing, half out of Lux's shirt and tightening like he’d wound shut on a series of gears. At some point, Cael had kicked the blankets off, or Lux had rolled away with them in the chill; Cael lay exposed in flashes of lightning through the open door, his arms rigid, his hands clasped beneath his tucked and shivering thighs. When Lux sat up and very carefully leaned over him, the coil in his gut going cold with terror for the wound he might find — Cael's face was unblemished, but no less disturbing. His eyes were open, their light dimmed and his pupils shrunken points that darted without seeing; his mouth was hanging open like a panting cat, the only sign of his breathing the steam plumed through chilly air. At the hesitant touch of Lux's hand on his arm, he did not blink, did not open his mouth any wider, but an ugly, keening moan rose from him.

Lux rolled away, searching the night stand with the perfect calm of an irrational fear set to rest. He had not been dreaming, only deeply asleep, and there was nothing to remember. Only Cael’s nightmare to deal with, licking his thumb and dragging it through the cap of crushed bloom.

He hovered the dose at Cael’s lips, rolled back in, his weight dipping Cael’s curled body toward the center. Leaning into his arm, he tangled his free hand at the back of Cael’s head, testing with a tug on the thickest part of his hair. Cael’s mouth opened a fraction wider, and he issued a single, long moan. He was solid in Lux’s hands, but he had never so resembled the spirit of a haunting. His skin was icy, his eyes unseeing. His teeth threatened to strip the skin of Lux’s hand, held carefully to his lips.

Lux tugged again, whispering his name, and Cael pressed his tongue to the dose. He was as careful as their first meeting, sucking the thumb into his mouth, licking the powder from it and closing his eyes when Lux said, “Don’t swallow.” Lux stared at his elegant profile, lines defined by deep shadows with every passing flash of lightning. Thunder punctuated the trembling muscles of his throat, all of them stood out and straining until the drugs eased some of the tension from his skin. When the planes of it evened out in the dark, Lux dropped his head, sucking the cold skin over Cael’s pulse between his teeth.

Under the hiss of the rain, between the clap of thunder and its echoing growl, Cael sucked a breath and exhaled: “You shouldn’t be here, you shouldn’t — ”

His pulse was weak and fast, then evened into a dull thud against Lux’s mouth. The words were an echo, something familiar and not quite real, not related to the present for all Cael presently gave them voice. In a moment between his slurring speech and silence, he was awake. His body began to shake in earnest, untethered from the tension of his nightmare and given nothing but Lux to act upon: it did not surprise Lux to be pushed down, or for Cael's hands to be clawed and stiff on the hem of his underwear.

There was an echo of their first time in the moment, an inversion — reality catching up to another phantom touch — when Cael dragged the briefs down Lux's thighs and dragged his shivering body between them, his voice returned to slip between his teeth saying _I need, I'm sorry, I just_ — and Lux only nodded, relieved that there was anything about him or his burning skin that Cael needed. Anything about him that could soothe the ugly tremors in the arms braced at his sides: be it his blood sucked between sharp teeth when Cael muffled the litany in his shoulder, or the tight heat Cael was nudging into with stiff fingers.

Lux rolled his shoulders and gasped for the pain, finding and nudging the jar of lotion against Cael's palm. There was a clatter and long shiver as Cael's spine took his weight, as his free hand skittered across the table for the condoms, as his mouth popped free of Lux's flesh to gasp an apology. His head pushed up against Lux's, and they were all wrong, two pieces slipped from their axis and tearing apart instead of moving together. Lux could not match the frantic energy sparking from Cael's skin, and Cael could not stop shaking, the hit of bloom trapping him in the fear instead of smoothing it clean and bright.

"Shh." He put both hands on Cael's face, slid one up the side, gathered his hair and held them forehead to forehead. Lux did not know how Cael could be this afraid, and still hard for him, still desperate to get inside — but he was hot all over, hard for the blood on his skin, hard for the slicked fingers pushing and rubbing him open while Cael whined for the delay. Lux dropped his mouth open and exhaled deeply, trying to relax, trying to show Cael how. "It's okay," he murmured, holding Cael close with a warm hand cradling the back of his head. "You're going to fuck me, it's going to be so good — you can do this. You can do whatever you need. I won't break." Cael sobbed, and shook, and for a moment that stretched until it snapped — Lux thought he might stop. His own legs trembled for the idea of it, for the thread broken, for both of them cast off from each other and wanting. "Shh," he said again, trying to weather more than one storm in the night. "Whatever you need, whichever it is, I don't mind.

"Cael," and then again: "Cael — " and he was whimpering when he nodded, his whole face pressed to the side of Lux's, not quite kissing below his ear. His lips pressed flat and closed to Lux's pulse, teeth clenched together, a threat behind the electric hum of his skin.

Lux felt feverish for it, too-close, and this was the false end of the dream: Cael, desperate and vulnerable, within his reach. Something he had not seen before, and it was perfect in a way Lux would be ashamed to put to words. It was perfect when he put the condom in Lux's hand, too broken open to put it on himself. It was perfect when he fucked himself against Lux's guiding fingers, groaning against the hot skin of his throat. It was perfect when Lux did not even have to ask, just lift his hips and tug Cael down, for Cael to shove inside and move him up into the pillows with sharp, earnest thrusts. Lux gripped the headboard, pushing back against each snap of Cael's hips, his head tossed back and his mouth dropped open on a moan; Cael fit his hands over Lux's thighs and shifted him into his lap, slid them up the backs to pin him open at the knees and his narrow frame drove up with a shocking, adrenaline-edged strength.

Shifting his grip, Lux locked his elbows and pushed, driving Cael deeper, until his breath was one long sound that rose and fell with every thrust. This was what he had wanted, both of them raw and heedless in the dark, every thought driven out of his head. This is what they had described the first morning on the couch, and it had taken two weeks to peel the cold away from Cael's skin, the caution from their hands, the secrecy embroidered to Lux's self like his family name on a kerchief. "Yes," he said, "Yes, just like that, Cael _please_ — "

They were coming back together — Lux had never asked, _what happened?_ Had never asked, _what will we be when this doesn't hold?_ He had felt the moment breathing against his throat, heard the ugly whisper of Cael almost leaving it broken — but his hands were pinning Lux's legs open on the pillows, and his hips were driving his head in a satisfying scrape against the headboard, and he was pushing Lux over the edge with a bellowing shout and his own come hitting him hot and dirty on the chest.

He lifted up and drifted slowly back in a fog, moaning and still clenching around Cael's cock. Shorter spurts peaked his razed nerves, and his arms were shaking, unable to release from their hold. Cael had to guide his legs to sprawl on the sheets, and he moaned again, whimpered for every touch. Cael was still hard, still barely shifting and rubbing inside him, but it was as if his frantic energy had been put into and vented out of Lux's body, burned away, that he might pry Lux's fingers from the headboard and kiss his knuckles as he laid them down. That he might kiss the sweat of his brow and keep going, only the slightest shake in his thighs as he ignored his own climax to lick the mess from Lux's skin.

There were words rising, more feeling than thought, like the idea of Cael he had woken up with in the dark.

"You really liked that," Cael said, panting and close enough for Lux to drop both arms around his neck and kiss the taste of himself out of Cael's mouth.

"I loved it," he answered, the words all but there before the asking, his voice slurred and softened by the tremors searching their way out of his skin. His chest felt heavy and right with Cael dragged against it, still buried in him and squirming for the throb of his want. Lux nuzzled up against him, kissing the skin that happened to be under his mouth, even when it edged into Cael's hair. "It was you, it was perfect." He found the strength to sling a leg over Cael's waist, trapping him under its weight; he rubbed the scruff of his cheek against Cael's throat, and sucked a bruise to the slope of his shoulder until his hips twitched him deeper inside. Cael was winding up again, squeezing Lux in his arms, something that defied explanation or just defied Cael's ability to speak of it, trying to close him up with Lux still inside. Lux shifted the leg around him to clutch Cael just as tight, just as close: "Do it again. Do exactly what you want."

It wound him the rest of the way, the tremors in his arms again, both of them buried under Lux's arms and looping for a hold on his shoulders. Cael's fingers dug into the open bites, pulling them fresh, and he gentled with a single groan that seemed to shake all of the tension out of his limbs. His eyes were wet, when he hid them against Lux's throat, but Lux was already holding him; he tipped his head up to kiss the top of Cael's, and rolled his hips to invite Cael to move again.

The way Lux would never tell it, the way he would grasp the words and fail to give them voice: it was imperative to finish him. It was the most important thing, in that moment, not to let him go. He shuddered and tightened the loop of his arms around Lux’s shoulders, as thrown as he had been on the first day, taken out of the moment until Lux kissed him. Tonight he was gentle, trying to ease him back into any rhythm; trying to make it easy, or just soft, until the urgency left and he might go back to sleep. Something about this was — 

He could not remember. Just the wounded weight of him, and a crushing sound and heft before he woke. Just the worry that somehow, he had wound his body too tight, spring loaded him and now floundered to deal with the release. Cael shook his head, hiding his cheek from Lux’s mouth, and muttered: _I can’t, I can’t_ — 

“What can’t you do,” Lux murmured, fixing a hand in his hair, gentle fingers untangling and drawing it up from his face. He drew himself up slowly, achingly, until he drew out against the tether of Lux’s legs and loomed on hands and knees, panting. Lux reached up with worried hands, petting his hair back to its usual shape around his face, holding it cuffed in his palm to Cael’s cheek. “Cael, it’s alright. Whatever it was, it’s just a dream.”

Cael shook his head; looked sideways. His marks were neon-bright, and he still shook — as if to shake them off, as if they were the source, not a symptom, of his distress. He bared his teeth and sighed: “I’m not here, I'm not — ” but broke off, helpless, unable to explain.

Lux remembered — a place like that, Epsilon closing a cut on his cheek and Andal not making him talk about it. Just telling him they were going to leave the city for a bit, hunt some Fallen, and how did that sound?

He turned them over, Cael shivering but pliant in his hands. He pet his hair back again, guiding him against the pillows and leaning up to kiss his brow. One hand laid to his throat, over Cael’s jackrabbit pulse, thumb careful on the water-light at the corner of his jaw. The other smoothed down his side, wrapped around his cock to pull him off with quick, easy strokes. “It’s alright; I’ve got you, I’ll take care of it. You don’t have to do anything.” Cael closed his eyes and nodded, subdued again, quietly gasping and humming for the feel of Lux’s hand. One steady breath, then another, and his hips rolled for it — he was always easiest to pin like this, one hand between his legs and the other at his throat, and it spoke to Lux like the rabbit’s foot, or the phantom touch before Cael’s hand had slipped into his pocket. It told him to be careful, to keep the pressure gentle around Cael’s neck, and kiss him softly between the eyes.

Cael came with a soft wail, that rose between a flash of light and clap of thunder. When it passed, Lux’s hand was pushing through the mess and Cael had burst into tears.

His stomach dropped; he wiped his hand careless on the sheets, hurried to cup Cael’s face in both hands and rub the wet tracks with his thumbs. “Cael,” he whispered, “Cael please, what’s wrong?” Cael put his hands on Lux’s wrists and didn’t pull his hands away, even as he shook his head against the hold. The light of his eyes slipped between his lashes as they slit for his tears, and Lux felt, irrational as before, afraid for the state of his palms. Afraid they would be raw, hot skin burned off by hot skin, but when he tried to pull away, Cael’s grip tightened. He shook his head again, and Lux begged: “Tell me, _talk_ to me — ” but Cael’s mouth opened and closed on a wounded noise, and this was the thing he could not do.

The moment drew taut, a tingle in Lux’s gut that spread under his skin. He was as afraid of his own request as the hands on his wrists, as the fact of Cael pushed to tears. His fault, his hands the ones on him — but Cael would not let him pull them away. Instead, he sucked air through his nose and throat, a rough unclogging sound, and slid his hands up to cover his own eyes. Lux retracted his fingers, so that he moved the pads of his hands down without taking another grip, without forcing any one part of him to stay against any one part of Cael.

“You don’t stay,” Cael whispered, fragments of nonsense at four in the morning, as the world wore itself out on the city outside. “You can’t stay — ”

Lux hovered his palm at his chest, fingers just-spread, used to the size of it against Cael’s sternum. Used to the lines of him in the dark, never so precious as when they blurred, and shook, and threatened to disappear. He could not tell if Cael was still shaking, because his own hand was shaking. “Do you want me to leave?”

Hands still covering his eyes, tears still tracking down his face, Cael shook his head. Lux exhaled hard and unsteady: whatever it was, whatever Cael could not say — it must not be him. It was not his hands that had hurt. Lux inhaled, and again, steadying himself that his hands could steady Cael. He pressed his palm over Cael’s heart and held him down, felt his chest expand and shrink in increments when a sob shuddered out of him. He ran a hand down his leg, satisfying the strange impulse — to know that Cael was not physically hurt.

“I’m sorry,” he said, even if it was not his fault. He gathered Cael up and tested his weight against him, pressing him fully into the pillows and blankets; Cael replied with a hiccup of sound and wove his arms around Lux’s neck. Again, he shook his head, flushed cheek to flushed cheek. He rubbed his tears on Lux’s hair and kissed the shell of his ear. He breathed deep, over and over, pushing his chest against the weight of Lux’s, and Lux breathed to match; until the hollow of Cael’s throat warmed and his shoulders eased a softer glow to the space. Until they were both breathing even, and the thunder was very distant, and the rain said nothing more as it gentled against the walls.

-

Dawn was a precarious time: Lux woke for the groan in his ear — an anxious, frustrated noise and one head butting the other until Lux was open-eyed and rolling away. He breathed deep the smell of the damp city, the smell of the damp bed going to starch sharpness under their bodies. They were both of them protesting, but Lux was not so far removed from last night that he hesitated more than a moment to wake: he rolled his body to the edge, dragged himself up, and padded softly from the room.

He was naked often as he wasn’t, in Cael’s apartment. The soft light of the room caught his edges, gilded the hair of his legs as he assessed the floor beneath his feet and scratched where it thickened on his abdomen. Starting at its tapered edge and climbing his chest were the trailing stains of last night, and he scratched one with a grimace before turning it to squint against the rising light.

The balcony door was ajar, wet drafts undermining the heater and rustling the pages of opened books. It didn’t take the mark on Cael’s palm to know him as a warlock, or the royal blue seal on his letters to link him to Lakshimi-2 and her ilk. It didn’t take a thumb through the handwritten journals to understand he wasn’t up to the most acceptable shit with void-sealed jars in his bathroom, or Epsilon’s assessment to see he didn’t have the best connection to his ghost. The silver scars mapped across his body had the glossy resilience of a first resurrection, tissue that could only grow so much in the Traveler’s light — but there were some smaller, and disconnected, as if their source defied her healing touch.

Any one of these deductions could contribute to — last night. Any one of them invited question, and the demand of an answer, to keep Lux rolling with the punches.

One punch, he thought. He was more than capable of unkindness, and selfishness, and — running away. There were his clothes on the couch, where he had tried to preserve them. There were his boots by the bathroom door. He didn’t even have to make a decision — he could go for a walk, smoke out on the street and return with his head cleared and his questions carefully formed in his mind. He could root out the cause to better deal with the symptoms, and he could — 

He wouldn’t leave, not like this. Breathing deep the morning air, he scrubbed a hand through his hair and turned for the kitchen. Cael’s dishes were mostly mugs — mugs for cups, mugs for bowls, a single plate Lux had only seen him set down for the cat — and Lux filled the tallest of them with cold water. For a moment, he was just a man in a kitchen, one foot still in the depths of sleep, and he thought: _when I go back to work I’ll buy him some proper dishes._

It blinked him a little more awake, a little more conscious of the water flowing over the cup and into his hand. Shutting it off, he transferred one to the other and wiped the wet on his face. Janus appeared between his feet to rub her arched sides against the backs of his legs, prompting a hum; he drank long and quiet from the mug, a highlight in the soft morning that drew down toward his mouth, disappeared into the ceramic. He filled it again and carried it back to the room.

Cael was halfway up from the pillows, rubbing grit from his eyes, at every angle pinched in a frown. His hair was a tangle that hung limp down the side of his face, stuck in several of its own creases, and though he scanned the room with some sense that settled him on Lux in the doorway, he did not open his eyes. By this hour he would be coming off the bloom, waking up from a rough night in a body that bore its evidence.

A week ago, Lux would have offered another pill, kissed him down into the sleep-warm sheets. It didn’t strike him as the wrong thing, but it might hurt Cael to take it with him now. It was time to ache awhile, and sleep too much, and consider the messages Epsilon had kept for him.

 _You don’t stay,_ Cael had said. _You can’t stay_ — 

Lux fit a hand over his ribs and eased him to sit against the headboard, tipping the mug to his lips. Cael’s eyes fluttered open long enough to lift a hand for its weight, supporting the bottom while Lux tilted it by the handle; Lux used his other hand to smooth the sweaty hair away from his face. Of course he couldn’t stay, not the way he was now — Cayde would get through to him eventually, and he would leave to hunt the Wolves who had murdered their friend, and if he survived that fight he would carry out mapping the Western territories assigned before Andal fell. But he did not have to leave tomorrow, or the day after, and he did not have to leave Cael here.

He didn’t have to leave, without ever coming back. Cael pressed the cool wet of his mouth to Lux’s palm, sighing into the join of his fingers and palm. His eyes were hooded and bruised, dim in a way Lux didn’t know the meaning of, like a ghost on its last store of light. When he leaned in to kiss them closed, he released Epsilon to the air; his ghost rolled against Piko on the far pillow. Their points clipped together and held, a series of quiet tones traded, and Cael leaned into Lux’s side.

The both of them wanted very much to stay.

 _This is dangerous_ , Epsilon still said, sitting on Lux’s shoulder when he stepped to the balcony, or sat alone in the second draw of the bath. He still refused to drift up toward the shelves and jars, to wander out of Lux’s sight — but he whispered it most fervently when they were looking at Piko, with her dim white eye flickering against the back of Cael’s neck.

Lux drew his hand to it, easing him on and over, draping him mumbled and sleep-dry against his own chest and thigh. It was dangerous, and strange — and something to gently offer aid, when the rings beneath Cael’s eyes were a shade lighter than today’s. Lux opened his legs and lifted at the knee to split Cael across it, fit their limbs in and around the other, before dragging the blanket up to their waists.

“Go back to sleep,” he said, kissing the top of his head. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

-

Between the dying storm and the bright day, they had sunk into a darker sleep, turned over until Cael was under him. Despite, or perhaps because of his size, Lux was often pulled atop Cael like a heavy blanket, while he grinned with his sharp teeth for the weight of him. This time Lux was only half on top, face pressed to the soft skin of his belly, with Cael’s hand in his hair to wake him up slow and easy.

The music from Lux’s dream carried on, or had started from Cael’s mouth and become the hum of his mother’s voice. He had been sitting with her at the piano, and between notes she had been praising how tall he was, and sweet, to chase his own sadness taking care of someone else.

 _You get that from me, I suppose._ Lux couldn’t be sure she’d said it, couldn’t remember her face, just the golden glow of her presence.

With his eyes still shut, he could hear the music and feel the warmth, an unmistakable solar presence unlike Cayde’s or his own. Hers, he blearily hoped, turning his face down in Cael’s middle and letting it ease the threat of a headache from his temples. It felt like he’d fallen asleep in the sun again, rather than a storm in the dead of night. Cael’s fingers scratched the thick hair at the back of his head, and he groaned, all of his limbs tensing for a satisfied stretch. He was hugging narrow hips, held by slim thighs, and Cael was still singing under his breath in a language Lux didn’t know. His soft voice, which could seem at odds with the intensity of his presence, was perfectly suited to the song and moment.

There were two of him — Lux could not abandon the idea — and one was a boy in a storm, raw-skinned and terrible; and one was this, calm and doting, with nowhere better to be and nothing better to do than pet Lux’s hair away from his face.

“You’re warmer,” Lux murmured, kissing the hot, dry skin that sloped away from his ribs. “You get warm when you sing.”

Cael lifted his arms to stretch, his legs tensing around Lux’s ribs, squeezing him while he swallowed a wide yawn. He had been sharp teeth and bright eyes, the first day, alien and a little off-putting — but now Lux was smiling against his stomach. He was alien, and strange, and scarred — and he was also cute. He was the boy who picked Lux’s pocket, and fit neatly to his chest in the alley, smiling up at him. He was also the boy who shook his head, pulling the blanket up over Lux and trapping him in his lap: “I doubt that, I think you’re just a human furnace.”

Then he farted with a soft whine and a sharp laugh, that bubbled into something softer, and he was the warmest Lux had ever had him when Lux choked and smacked his hip. He clawed out of the suffocating stink and rose up over him, hair mussed and still gagging.

This was, in a way, Cael broken open: a breathless mess with tears in his eyes, laughing, young and happy against the pillows. The storm had passed, and Cael hadn’t told him what it was, but Lux was laughing with him now. He was stupidly fond — of his pretty, alien face; of his breathless cackle. He sank down until their laughter eased off and Cael was just as fond, looking up at him. Until their smiles met and they were kissing with dry, gummy mouths.

“You’re the worst,” Lux groaned; Cael laughed again, his narrow chest shaking under Lux’s pinning weight.

“I know.” His smile was soft, he licked his lips. Lux could not help but kiss him again. It seemed impossible to broach the subject of last night when it would kill that smile.

How many bedrooms had Lux fled, caught crying between highs?

They broke apart to Janus yowling, and Lux squirmed for the stab of small paws over his back. She had followed him in then, and settled on his back when they had stopped moving in the half-light. She was not impressed to have been disturbed, and walked up to rub her scent to the back of his head. He hummed a laugh and let the movement push him down into another quick kiss, then tucked his head down against Cael’s shoulder. He sighed: “I wish my dog was here.”

Cael scratched his fingers up, through the growing hair at the back of Lux’s neck; Lux hummed and closed his eyes. “Where is he?”

“Across the river, with my brother and his dog.”

“I’ve never had one.”

He smiled, trying to picture Cael with something that big and excited; Aldebaran was an older dog now, but he wasn’t quite Janus, and his tail would sweep a welt to the floor if Cael tried to hold him with the same indulgent stillness he gave the cat. “I don’t know if he would fit in here, we wouldn’t pay him near enough attention.”

Cael pressed in with his nails, deepening the scratch over Lux’s scalp. He was melting for the touch, soaking up the warmth of Cael’s body before he remembered to — banish it, somehow. “You’re very confident I would choose you over a dog.”

“Haven’t you? Surely there were strays with four legs out that day.”

“Strays don’t have homes; you have a brother.”

Lux sighed long and deep as Cael concentrated his nails on the top of his scalp; he wasn’t so sure he couldn’t tame Aldebaran into a doze. “I wonder why you took me in, then.”

“I wonder too.”

Lux picked his head up, finding only a sleepy smile, and dark circles, and closing eyes. He waited out a wide yawn, watching Cael’s teeth catch the light, then disappear behind his kiss-bruised lips. Leaning in, he pressed something softer, sweeter, against them.

“What was that for,” Cael asked, humming as Lux pulled away. The soft humor was rolling out of him, replaced with a wave of genuine curiosity. It hooked a claw between Lux’s ribs and tugged, that Cael might not know. It made it necessary to lean in again, to kiss him without intent.

“I just wanted to.”

  


* * *

IV.

It was two days off the pills — two days of cigarettes and cool, clean water; two days of dozing on each other in the bath, and feeding each other takeout that tasted better the longer it sat in its own grease; two days of testing the tired edges of a familiar body and having their edges tested, and still not asking — before Cael woke alone to the sound of someone crying.

He had been on the beach, and heard it carried on the rolling waves. There had been a man, unlike the men who howled from the edge of the forest. This one had been calm, and soft at his edges, more of a good feeling than concrete features. Cael could not have said if he was tall or short, dark or light, could not have named the color of his eyes. Only that they had been warm, and that the hand on his shoulder had reminded him of his father’s. Glass had layered a shine to each of his footprints, counter to the black pitch of Cael’s, and his hunter’s cloak had carried a smell of ozone and clear, high air in its folds. The hands grown from the sand sank and retreated from his steps, and Cael had understood that the man was not a seed planted at the edge of the forest — he belonged to it, and the Garden, and had more right to intrude on the space than anyone who had touched Cael in the waking world.

The crying had swelled, carried in with the tide. It should not have been heard over the surf, but seemed to replace the sound. The water sobbed up to their ankles, and sniffled as it dragged back over the sand. The man’s hand had been heavy on Cael’s shoulder and neck, squeezing once. He had looked up, and for a moment there were brown eyes and a dark face, a familiar voice: “He doesn’t know any better than you, how to ask for things.”

“You’re his, aren’t you. You’re someone he knows.”

“Does that make you his as well?”

Cael had looked to the trees, and the men sinking their roots into the dirt. “I remember you,” the man had said, his hand slipping down Cael’s arm, gripping gently. It hadn’t seemed the kind of hold Cael should shrug off. It reminded him — it reminded — 

Sometimes the screams in the flames were familiar, but he had yet to see Hanzi on the beach. He had found the blankest, safest patch of sand to drop his gaze to, and stared intently, afraid of what features he would not find on the man’s face. “I wish you could have talked to us. I wish we could have asked, without being told. Ikora would not fail you again.”

He had closed his eyes, and shaken his head. The waves had washed higher on their legs, and the crying had been louder, closer than the wide horizon. “Give him a little more time.”

One step had freed him from the grip, sullen and perfectly his age, the waves of Lux’s sobs pushing the back of his ankles. “You know that isn’t how anything works, you know — we _need_ you and you can’t even _stay alive_ — ” and he was angry at them all when he rolled into the cold space Lux had fallen asleep in and blinked awake.

It was the dark before dawn, the same precarious time Cael came home in, blinking across rooftops and playing chicken with the river. His body did not want to be awake, or moving, but the doors were open and Lux was still crying beyond them. First it was the bedroom door, swinging from where it had been left to invite the breeze. Cael’s hands ran along its edge and the door’s frame; he stepped on one of his long dark shirts abandoned to the floor and picked it up, pulled it on inside-out and listened to the sounds outside hiccup and cease, held in for the moment as his footsteps knocked across the living room.

By the time he walked to the couch, swung on his long wool coat, and padded to the balcony, Lux had folded back into his knees and resumed crying, only his arms muffling the sound. It made perfect sense to Cael, that Lux would hide in the dark with a rabbit’s foot clutched in his hand, sobbing and alone. It made perfect sense, even after that night.

Giving and receiving were very different things. Cael was glad to be the one dry-eyed and running his hands through someone’s hair. Grateful that the angry lump in his throat had calmed the moment he passed from the apartment to the night air, had found Lux huddled small and soft.

They were both of them shadows, a series of angles and highlights in the soft glow of Cael’s eyes and the polluting light of the city. They were both of them sober for several days, and Cael was not stupid — they were off the pills for his benefit, because he’d had a bad trip and terrified them both before dawn. They were off the pills together, to Lux’s detriment, because he had been using them to float above what now squeezed him until the sobs came out. Cael was proving less a safe harbor than a place to run aground, and now the pain had caught up.

Sighing, he went to one knee and fit himself over Lux the best his frame could stretch. He pulled his arms from the sleeves, using his body to drape the warm coat across them both, and ran his hands down and over Lux’s arms to loosen their squeezing grip. Put his hands on Lux’s hands and coaxed them open around the soft charm, until he could lift it away and put it in the coat’s pocket. He kissed the side of his face, when it just-lifted from his opening arms: “I’ve got it, it’s safe there. It’s alright, everything’s alright.”

“It isn’t,” Lux gasped, his voice shaking with his body: “It isn’t; he’s gone. He’s just _gone._ ”

“I know,” Cael answered, and the name did not matter, the precise features of the figure on the beach. Was it the old hunter vanguard, or his father? Was it a dream, or something true? Cael still knew: he framed Lux’s face in both hands, looking at him in the dark. “It hurts every day, no matter how many days pass.”

Lux nodded, a new sound breaking in his throat, new tears blurring on his lashes and dragging down the tracks on his face. It was a hideous inverse: Cael breathed deep and exhaled steady, finding a kind of serenity as he watched him claw the tears in his half-assed beard. Found his own center of calm as he watched him dangle at the end of a hook, thrashing away from a feeling he could not escape. It was not a client at the end of a rage, or Cael’s own ugly fear in the night. This was just grief, and helplessness, and Cael remembered what to do with it.

First: he took Lux by the wrists, and pulled his hands from his face. Then: he stared at him, blinking, and breathing, until Lux was matching the rhythm. The air was humid between their faces, Cael’s thick coat draped over both of their heads. When Lux’s steadying breath caught again, and tripped into another series of whimpered sounds — he slid his hands into his hair and guided Lux to his shoulder, holding him close in the warmer dark. “It’s okay,” he murmured, “it’s okay that it still hurts. It’s okay if you’re not okay yet.”

The claws of Lux’s hands clutched at his arms, and the sound rose and broke against his collar in a whine. Cael breathed, was near to sleep with the depth of his own calm, as Lux growled against his throat and soaked the fabric on his shoulder.

He dragged a hand between Lux’s back and the weight of his coat, finding the curve of his head; he smoothed the texture of it down under the wool over, and over, humming sympathetic notes for every rough whine in Lux’s throat. Lux was not pawing between his legs, or pushing him over. He was not mute, and terrible, and pulling away — he was just a boy, holding on and crying. He had suffered a cleaner break, and Cael was gentle with the edges of it, as perfectly distracted as he had been rutting against him on the couch. “You’re alright,” he said, rocking him carefully, breathing deep as Lux began to quiet. “Get it out, it’s alright.”

There were long moments measured by the pair of them breathing, made louder by proximity and the shroud of Cael’s coat. Lux was an uglier shade of warm, cried out, rubbing his chin on the collar of his jacket and making no move to leave the ring of Cael’s arms. Colder air cut them at the waist, slipped over Cael’s naked legs: Lux was fully dressed, stretching a pair of Cael’s socks that went all the way to the knee.

“Do you want a glass of water,” Cael asked, and Lux shook his head. It was Cael’s turn to kiss swollen eyes, and fuss with the folds of his jacket, as if he could make the weight of it sit more comfortably on Lux’s frame.

“Can we stay out here awhile longer?” Lux’s voice, when he finally tested it in the space, was immediate and rough. Cael was nodding as he leaned into it, his shoulders bringing soft light to the space, brighter when one slid free of his wide collar. His lips pressed dry to the tacky, too-warm skin of Lux’s cheek, and he was as charmed by it as Lux was by the marks. One hand slid up Cael’s arm to trace the whorls of color, as the other pulled a freshly depleted pack of cigarettes from Lux’s pocket. “Why do they do that,” he asked, leaning back to conjure the flame between his fingers with solar light.

Cael flinched without thinking, and Lux had to push the coat up, flip it off them and close his hands on the flame to avoid burning the wool. “Hey,” he said, his warm hand squeezing steady to Cael’s arm. His voice was torn out, soft with terrible use: “Easy, sorry. I’m sorry.”

He shook his head, finding some of his calm again in the tacky tracks of dried tears on Lux’s face. In the way he turned away to light the cigarette, and drew deep before offering it filter-first. Lux was finding something similar, and the symmetry remained — they were not asking, except, they half-knew. They were each neatly distracted from themselves by the evidence of the other’s pain, and the desire to put their hands on it. Lux put his hands to Cael’s calves, turning to sit between his legs, with the coat laid over them both. Cael leaned in with his arms over Lux’s shoulders, and Lux bent to the weight, until they were settled between the doors and rail and sharing the cigarette cheek-to-cheek.

“So,” Lux exhaled, smoke filtering from his nose. “Fire.”

Cael breathed the smoke deep, like dreaming the memory, and subverting it when the smoke left him and he did not choke. “I was ten,” he answered, because the fact of it was painted to his skin, and it was the easiest thing to admit. “I was the only one who came back.” It was not a happy thing, any kind of consolation, but he rolled his hand out from the wrist to release Piko to the air. At his knee, Lux did the same with Epsilon. The pair found each other in the dark, touching points and rolling together into the folds of Cael’s coat where it stretched between Lux’s knees. Cael could feel, in his lizard brain, the trickle of light being fed to his ghost. It hit him like the cigarette, evened him out until he was tilting his head to rest on Lux’s shoulder, letting Lux hold it to his lips and squeezing both arms around his chest. “Maybe — ”

He took another drag on the filter, and let the words go. There was no path leading from this moment, where it did him any good to say, _maybe I came back for you._ When Lux offered again, he turned his face away. When Lux said he was sorry, and it was awful, and he had lost his mother very young — Cael kissed the edge of hair growing below his jaw, and told him not to worry about it.

“Come here,” he said instead, shifting back until he hit the wall, and Lux was leaned against his chest. Lux hummed and blew smoke in a long plume, stretching his legs and looking up at Cael in the dark. His face was relaxed, open, and he smiled when Cael fit his legs around Lux’s waist and pulled the coat higher to cover them. “Try not to fall asleep on me,” he warned, and told him the story of the cloak that reflected the sky, finding his father’s voice in his throat.

-

It was getting into the third week, Cael stepped out to the balcony and Lux letting the warm day dry him as he dozed on the couch. His towel was rough and musky with need for a wash, and he added it idly to the list of things to collect, when he found the will to walk further from the apartment than the ramen shop downstairs. Plates, towels, bedclothes, pillows, toothbrush, more than two shirts — 

Lux put an arm over his eyes. Did one ask to move in, when they hadn’t left in twenty days? When they had twenty days of half-truths and scattered clues, but no firm grasp of — a person they were sleeping with?

He didn’t want to think about it. He wanted the warmth of the heater to mix with the warmth of the day, dry him into a solid nap, wake up to Cael sliding a hand under his towel and dinner demands that wouldn’t be filled for hours. His legs flexed a bit for the thought of it, and he stretched his toes — one foot, then the other — and blinked awake for the realization that his hip hadn’t ached in over a week.

He spent a lot more time horizontal than he used to: it didn’t have to mean anything.

Sliding his arm down, he set his mouth to it and covered his frown. Pinched his brows with it and squinted at the light on the wall, shifting for the door moving on the breeze, and Cael’s shadow cutting across it. Piko’s resolved beside his head — its own shimmer in the air, then solid and blocking the sun. She cut across the shadow of his head several times, circling it.

Piko was the more difficult of the two to hear, more so for the voice not being her own. It was a woman’s voice, deep and calm. For a moment, Lux turned his gaze to the light-limned silhouettes through the glass, mistaking it for Couru. He could see Piko looking down at Cael from an angle, and his shoulders lifted and set, his arms folded. It was not a posture Lux had seen before, and he peered around the drape of his own elbow, strained to hear the cause:

“I am neither used to nor fond of asking my employees if they plan to grace me with their presence, Lupei.”

“You chose to make this call.”

“You’re young: pray you live long enough you learn that profitability does not let you speak to me that way.”

Cael’s posture slid sullen at the shoulder, and he tapped a nail to his teeth: “I will live; that’s why you call.”

“It certainly isn’t appreciation of your company.”

“I’m working, Viera. You know that was part of the deal, sometimes I’m unavailable.”

“Three weeks in a row?”

“Consider my original price a scientific grant. It’s research, it involves weird hours.”

“It also involves results, and making the investment worth my while. You still haven’t sent me the money from your last job; don’t tell me you were foolish enough to spend it.”

“I have it, I’ll transfer it now.” Lux put the arm back over his eyes, expecting to hear the door open, expecting — something to involve him, in the solution to this strange problem. Cael had taken his wallet, the first day. Cael had not left the apartment since, and he must _do something,_ in some capacity, to maintain it. He must know, if he didn’t when he marked Lux on the street, that he’d taken a Tyndarid to bed.

The door did not swing open: Cael murmured with the cadence of a call sign, of the coordinates for another ghost, and Piko added the chime of transference to the afternoon air. Wherever the money came from, it wasn’t Lux’s pocket. He stared past the edge of his arm at the ceiling, and a hollow sank in his stomach.

“Why on earth — ”

“I told you, I’ve been busy. It’s not like you were hard up for it.”

“This is the last time you refuse me. The next job I send you, you take, or I’m sending someone down there.”

He did not hear Cael sigh, but he saw his shadow expand with breath and deflate: “A week. I’ll send you something extra, pick something up, just let me see out the month.”

“Fine; but I expect that money the moment you’ve come into it.”

Sullen painted Cael as close to his age as joy did: “Understood.”

When Cael followed his shadow in through the doors, Lux had his arm properly over his eyes, his other draped over his chest. He had gone from damp to gently starting to sweat, and was not disappointed, in a sideways glance, to find Cael dragging his eyes along the length of him. Whatever just happened, whatever tried to intrude on the strange warp of space and time they created in the apartment, it was only so effective.

Another week. Lux could find it in himself to ask, before that. Twenty days of idly skimmed journals and the fit of Cael's body against his own — he didn't think Cael would ask. He didn't think it would occur to him: he might just leave the balcony door ajar to let Lux come and go with the cat.

It would be a bit of a jump, but Lux could make it. He imagined riding his sparrow down from the hangar, on the wrung-out and sleepy end of a long flight; he imagined stowing it in Epsilon and climbing after Janus to the open doors, carrying her inside over one arm as a rumbling weight. Cael would be asleep, half rolled in his sheet with his back exposed to the light cut through the main room. Or he would be on the couch, where Lux could picture him curled when he came home to the apartment empty. Asleep in his long shirt with his legs exposed to the air, curled up between him and the cushions. Lux imagined sweeping his hand through dark hair, waking him gently, putting the cat into his arms as he leaned over for a long-awaited kiss.

It wasn’t — this, right now. But there was warmth in it. He imagined it warm.

He imagined the gentlest rattle of glimmer chips on the low table, the roll and topple of an old world coin. Turning his head out from his arm, smearing the sleepy weight from his eyes with it, he found Cael at the table, emptying the wallet as if for the first time.

He thought of Piko, rattling and chiming with a transfer, but the amount Cael separated with slim fingers and slid into piles was the same Lux counted after his last food run. But the majority of it was stored in Epsilon, meted out with gruff warnings about closed accounts and his father’s stipulations. In the months before he would never have touched it, but his own account tangled his intestines to look at: as if the money stored there was one more piece of Andal to lose. In a way, it wasn’t even his money on the table, deliberately and openly counted under Cael’s hands.

“So you did want the money,” Lux sighed, rolling over with the towel coming undone at his hip. Cael’s glance pricked the silver scar and dropped, dismissive, back to the task. It stung more than the idea of there being any truth to the words — let him have it, if only his attention wouldn’t waver from the invitation of Lux’s sprawl. “I knew it,” he teased further, stretching his arms out to the wall, pushing at it to stretch his entire body free of the towel. _One more week_ wasn’t a guarantee of anything, and yet — he wanted to start it now, to test the boundaries of what a week could hold. He had at least three rounds in him before he had to eat, and Cael had a very long fuse for someone Epsilon reported close to twenty. Lux himself had only turned twenty-two this summer, the second of his birthdays celebrated alone.

A very long fuse, and a very steady focus for something that wasn’t Lux stretched naked across the couch, his towel draped to the floor. Lux sighed deeply, turning over to put his head in his arms.

“You are not cute,” Cael said, in the unnecessary way that told Lux he rather was, and it drew his lazy grin over a pout. “I have to pay rent somehow, and you’ve kept me busy.”

“By all means then;” Lux swept his arm out from under his head, indicating the table: “you’ve more than earned it.”

Twenty days was too many flips of the coin to not land on an argument, to not open his mouth and say the wrong thing. Lux had faced worse odds than twenty to two in a game of cards with Nova and Cayde. It felt worse, to see his money pushed back to the center of the table and abandoned by Cael’s hands: his face was cut by a frown and he brushed his knees with both hands as he stood, as if dirtied by the offer. Lux swept his arm back on its arc to catch him by the wrist, before he could stand fully and take more than his attention away. “No, Cael — I was kidding. It’s fine. I’ve been here for awhile, consider it my share for the rent, I don’t mind.”

Cael stared down his arm as if Lux’s grasp were somehow foreign. Point A lost in a fog, and the direction forgotten to the point B of Lux’s fingers on his wrist. Lux felt his own point A find its silhouette in memory, in the phantom nerves tensing his grip, when he watched Cael pull himself straight-shouldered and impassive. There were two of him, the way there had been two of Lux before Epsilon, and Lux knew the violence it took to move between them. That he might be the reason hurt more than Cael rooting around in his wallet, or withholding his gaze.

“You continue to have very strange reactions to being robbed,” he said, not entirely gone.

Lux used the grip on his arm to haul himself up, getting only a roll of bright eyes and a steadying grip on his hand. He needed the walk to the ramen shop. Cael needed him to walk to the ramen shop, perhaps, to take the money on the table. Stretching again, this time vertical to Cael’s space, he smiled down at Cael’s returned attention and kissed him once before gathering his clothes: “It keeps working out in my favor.”

-

There were six hundred fifty-eight credits on the table. Lux had run his hand through the pile on his way out, tucked several chips to his wrist and mentioned dinner at the door. If he had been on his way out for good, or at all harsh in pulling on his clothes, or stomping his boots across the floor — 

What would Cael have done? His fingers had shook, separating the chips to their piles. When Lux had not immediately returned, he had gone down to his knees again, counted, sat on his hands. They were still tucked under his shins, his knuckles crushed uncomfortably to the hard floor. Heat sliced his eyes, a deep enough distress that Piko shimmered into existence over his shoulder. “He said you could have it.”

The cut went deeper, and his eyes were too hot, his vision of the table blurred. He could not get up for his hands, and he could not blink without the tears falling.

“What if he doesn’t come back,” he said, and sucked a breath through his teeth. Six hundred fifty-eight credits on a table, the last of the pills on the nightstand, one of Lux’s shirts on the back of the couch. That’s what it would be worth. That’s what it would take to twist twenty days in his guts, razor sharp, eviscerate him on his own floor. And he had — felt that, or was going to feel it, near enough that he put his head to the table and curled to protect himself from a phantom touch. Even as a child, he had never been very good separating imagination from that greater sense.

“He’ll leave,” he told the edge of the table. “I can’t keep this up.”

Piko landed light to the dip of his shoulder, rolled herself to the back of his neck, then followed the arc of his head turning on its side to rest atop his hair. “Lux isn’t like the other guardians you’ve met. He’s like you.”

“Irresponsible? Unreported?”

“Lost.”

The table’s edge carried out from the limits of his gaze to its far corner, as good a place as any to focus. He breathed deep. Tears tracked sideways across his face, but more did not follow, a momentary lapse he could cover before Lux — probably — came back. “I know exactly where I am,” Cael said in a hush, staring down the planes of the table until they were a tilting, dizzy series of lines. They teetered there, from the night Lux appeared on the beach, to the inevitable fall. It had hurt Lux, even a moment, to want the money. It hurt now to have it freely given. Cael could feel in the press of wood to his temple, that it would hurt Lux again to leave it untouched.

Rolling her points over the curve of his head, Piko tipped onto the table and rattled in frustration, sitting over the chips of glimmer. “Epsilon has more, I can send this to Viera, we could ask — ”

Cael lifted a hand, deep blue with the blood rushing back to his fingers, and stilled her under its weight. “Leave it. I’ll work something out.”

  


* * *

V.

_One for the road:_ Cael walked the swollen edge of the river, with water cutting a spray over the rock ledge to cool his ankles and bloom dissolving under his tongue. The sun was not yet set, cutting warm over the mountain and topmost edge of the wall; the sky tealed in the east. His feet would know when to turn back into the twist of tight alleys; his head lifted on the dose to swim in the deepening sky, to keep his thoughts away from the crushing weight of the river, and the crushing weight of his damp ankles, and the crushing-grinding-spitting machine they were walking him back to.

He pinched his own cheeks, popped his own mouth open and shook himself between his own nails. It cleared him, and he breathed.

_You will not jump into the river._  
_You will not sit out here all night, deciding._  
_You will not —_

There was the turn: his feet automatic in their tilt and the rest of his body flowing up from their guidance. Shale created shallow steps and cracks to carefully step between, step on a crack and — and — it didn’t really matter, did it? His father’s back had been broken before he’d been conceived.

Things could retroactively be his fault, when one tangled every fiber of themselves in the concept of _fate._ He crushed a lip of stone under his sandal and closed the circle, the sensation pricking through his sole and waking him to the brittle-bright upswing of his high. He became acutely aware of the close walls, the deepening blue shadows, the change of the street under his steps. Shale slabs in the alley gave way to the cobbled shale slabs and corrugated metal of the open street, the gaps in the stone filled with whatever had been on hand at the time. Vehicles crawled for the crowds constantly splitting and crossing into the road, and those with wheels gave equal caution to the sharp edges of broken stone and sunken plating, where water wore away the crust and exposed dirt and porous rock to the air.

A city built on the principle of _whatever works,_ the parts he called home never so different from the Reef. Mara would take him in his mother’s stead, but why travel halfway to the edge of a galaxy to still wind up on his knees? Here at least, he sometimes visited the parts of the city his parents had dreamed of on the smuggler’s ship, sometimes ran his hand over the real stone and brick of a fortified manor, sometimes walked through real grass and paused in the shade of a blossoming tree.

They wouldn’t be proud, but his parents would understand. He had the kind of life he might have grown into anyway, trying to move them out of the cobbled plaster-on-crushed-shale block house. Nobles didn’t quite pay the same for card readings and bad news.

Without accepting a contract, he’d never find one by crossing the river. His feet were leading him through the blue alleys and salmon-lit streets to the neighborhood a single spiral out from his own apartment, where the classes mixed to barter and gamble, trade information, exchange services for glimmer and substances that might as well be their own low-town currency.

It did not escape him, even in a narrow alley with the sun escaping along the eaves, that he had found Lux on the edges of this place. Seven hundred was a sizeable withdrawal of funds to have on-hand after buying that much bloom; Cael’s grasp of the past was not quite parallel his sense of the future, but his sharpened mind latched onto the fact of it, and he was not stupid on either side of a dose.

_You’ve more than earned it._

Cael shook himself like Janus waking up in a tight stretch, running a nail along the alley wall to counter the loop of his thoughts. Everything had a price, even what he tried to freely give.

If there were anywhere to navigate the slim divide between price and consequence, it was this narrow alley that cut alongside the district’s gambling house. Bloom steadied his hand against the wall of the Rookery, clutched him up and out of the spiral of Lux’s voice and the slip of glimmer under his palm, and told him the precise moment to look up to catch a dark figure leaping one roof to the next. He had seen it often enough, a prick of his senses that turned his eyes _up_. She felt more spark than shadow, an electric current leaping across a space, and those who saw that shadow often enough knew she recognized them as well. The work Viera gave him must make excellent blackmail.

There was no thread in his gut, not yet, that spun him at the corner and sent him up the Rookery’s steps. One was not often threatened for a pile of books, ten tea-stained mugs, and a two-faced cat. The fact of a Tyndarid asleep on his couch was — 

Cael did not pursue the thought for several more turns, until he was running his finger round the curve of a brass knob on The Cages’ back entrance. The fact of Lux was immutable, unforgettable, and desperately held separate from the fact of his hand fitting the handle. He had pulled his coat from under Lux’s head and let himself be goaded into a tug-of-war, no prescience needed to predict its end: himself, let out one step and reeled immediately in, swept into the circle of Lux’s arms, put on the couch and held impossibly close.

“Where are _you_ going,” he had laughed, kissing the front then back of Cael’s ear. He had tested the hold for the tickle of it, and been kissed more firmly on the temple.

“I have to go out; I’ll bring back dinner.”

“Will you be very late? Will you come back with another man you’ve worked over?” There had been laughter in his voice, a rumble in his chest, pressed to Cael’s back and side. His mouth could not stop pressing warm kisses to the side of Cael’s face, to the edges of his hair, and the edge of where it grew longer from the natural line of its part. “I’d be up for it, long as you aren’t replacing me.”

Cael had stared with one eye able to train on Lux’s face, and Lux had choked a bit on an audible laugh. His face had gone endearingly pink and his eyes had slid endearingly away — and Cael’s heart still beat in his ears for the strange possession of his voice.

He wanted to be kept. Cael — could not imagine the price in keeping him.

“Just dinner,” he’d said, kissing him soundly before slipping from his grasp.

Tugging the door open, Cael stepped into the dark of the back hall. It was rarely empty, and on the cusp of this evening, servants and escorts traded sides of the narrow space, fixing the other’s makeup or costumes on their way to the open floor or a private room. The Cages was a colloquial name, one uttered in several languages by the workers and filtering to the rest of the city like shoots of green in the first rains of spring. When Cael had left the tower, he’d followed the ivy trail back to its ugly root — feeling his way through the wet river dirt until his hands grasped the serendipity of it. Large amounts of money for short periods of work, anonymity, and fealty to a woman even Calliope would pause to cross.

It worked, until the truth of it sunk to bedrock, and sent its own growth to the surface of the beach. It worked, until — today, with his ghost full of warm light, and his hair firmly kissed, and skin covered in the fingerprints of gentle hands.

“Viera’s in the upstairs office; I would steer clear.” A hand fit and separated from his elbow, replaced by another passing body in the crush of the hall. This one wrangled its grip tighter and shook him, tugged him so that he tilted lower and had to lift his eyes: “Go back to the wall, you fucking parasite, the floor is _ours_.” He grinned, all sharp teeth and languid eyes, snapping once at the tassel from their shoulder. They flinched away, shaking him one more time.

He didn’t like The Cages; Vieraa didn’t like his attitude. It suited neither of them to paint and costume him for the floor, with his stiff legs and thick scars. She kept a folder with several pictures and the terms of his contract, and clients sent word through her. What he was about to do was stupid, and not just for the wrath of the house staff. Not just for stealing work from Viera’s own house, to buy her patience. She would tolerate it, but only just, and he would run a gauntlet of fierce hands every time he came and went from her office.

Cael was split again at the branch of the halls, between the lower offices and the swinging doors to the open hall. Every swing altered the sounds, so that laughter and groans rolled on waves between the shouted bids, the errant voice raised at the perfect moment to demand a drink. The servers slipping in and out with the noise were as dearly painted as the staff — were the staff, in a specific costume. Cael ran a nail against the wall and knew how he would slip onto the floor without notice: any server could lean in close to whisper the drinks of the night, and any guest could tug a server off the floor instead of a caged prize. He could leave the money in the office, he could — 

— continue splitting at the intersection, his throat burning at its base. In one split, he carried on to the office and dug his file out of the desk. He took Brask at his word and delivered it to Ikora, asking what could be done. He told Lux he had business at the tower, and didn’t think he was up for the visit: he told Lux very little else, because there was nothing left in the day to day to tell. He lost the apartment, and he lost his research to the hard lines of Ikora’s mind, but he did not lose Lux.

In another, he walked through the doors in a vest and trousers, made enough money to see out the month, and that was as far as his phantom walked before the path continued branching, a web lifting on the draft of a butterfly’s wing. _Oh fire mine, there is still so much to do._ So much he had only just begun, and he had neglected her as much as he had Viera.

Cael put his hands in his pockets, found the rabbit foot on its worn brass chain. The hall was emptied and the doors closed for the moment, everyone in their place — and while he knew where he was, he didn’t know where he was supposed to be. At the Tower, on the floor, in a velvet-draped bed, in a bath, in Lux’s arms. In the Garden, on the beach, six-feet-fucking-under or — 

It wasn’t worth it, to stand with his hand on the wall and wonder. It wasn’t worth it to try. Sagging under the weight of his coat, he brushed his thumb over the soft fur, put it back in his pocket. Sometimes you just got fucked, and that was the way of it.

“Do you hate me like this too,” he asked no one, and no one answered from the hollow of his chest.

-

Bruised and bitten, Cael had folded the simple uniform over-under his arms and set it in the top drawer of Viera's desk, glimmer and a few solid coins piled atop. She would know it was him from the spark of void it took to overcome the lock. He'd turned her chair to hold the drawer closed, and let Piko erase the marks before tugging the weight of his coat over his own clothes.

She was flush with light of late, a point of heat in his bottom ribs. Cael traced the line along his skin, safely home and tucked to Lux's side on the couch. It had been several hours after sunset when he'd knocked on his own door, hands weighted with takeout and a pack of beer. "Cans," Lux had asked, a laugh caught in his throat, "What are you trying to feed me?" He'd taken both from Cael's hands, a roll in his steps as he'd retreated into the apartment to set the low table, to bring a blanket from the bed to the couch, covering the stranded shirts and trousers. Cael had watched from the doorway at the familiar body made strange, tired and hungry and a hook dragging his heart into his guts.

Lux had been a wave, rolling in and changing the space, inexorable and steady in the way he'd receded into kitchen and bedroom, returned to the couch, finally settled. It occurred, sitting against the warm support of his side — he might have gone a little stir-crazy while Cael was out. The floors were swept, the books piled beside instead of on the table, and Lux ate with more enthusiasm than the late carryout deserved.

Perhaps it was his own bias: Cael could not seem to stomach more than two bites in a row. They stuck in his throat, and anything he wanted to say piled behind, until the lump was the size of his stomach and defying his appetite.

He set the carton aside, popped the tab on a beer and licked the rising foam from his fingers. Lux pulled clean chopsticks from his lips, eyes trained sideways to Cael's mouth. It was easier to tip the can up and show Lux his throat, drinking in one long, sour swallow, than it was to meet his gaze. When he set the empty can down with a soft rattle, Lux was putting his own carton next to it. He sat back and slung one arm across Cael's shoulders, pressing his face to the curtain of his hair and breathing deep, like Janus sniffing his hand after a walk through the city. Whatever Lux found, it didn't warrant a response: he hummed as he settled in, and found a thread at the waist of Cael's shorts, winding it around his finger.

With a snort, Cael relaxed into him under his weight. "That's sexy."

Another rumble of laughter, directly to his scalp: "I don't know, it could be. They would unravel eventually."

Cael sighed, letting the beer and Lux warm him. He had no tolerance for alcohol, for all the bloom he could pack against his gums and keep standing. It was the point, really, of drinking beer instead. He wanted to be soft, with an excuse to bleed out of himself, when he shifted his legs to lay across Lux's knees and tucked his head to kiss the corner of his jaw.

The arm around his shoulder lifted, crooked, laid a hand over the shaved side of his hair and scratched at the topmost edge. "Were you out picking pockets?"

"I'm not a pickpocket."

Lux hummed, using the flat of his hand to prompt the shift of Cael's head, that he might kiss the red mark above his brow. "Are you a writer, then?" Cael was aimed into the humid space between his head and shoulder, able only to see the glow of the heater cutting across the worn comforter beneath them. It was a small place, safe, calling to echoes of other such spaces — the curtain of his mother's hair, or the corner of his father's arm with his hip, when Cael had laid himself across his lap in the old chair, eight and perfectly consolable.

"Something like that. Does it matter?" He watched the shadow of Lux's fingers in his hair, separating the long from the short, carding the line straight back from the edge of his crown.

"No, I just — realized you might be getting back to it. That I might have to get back to something too."

"You did want to start paying rent."

The hand stilled: "I would, if you wanted. I like it here." Lux did not push with his palm, or tug with his fingers, but Cael lifted from his shoulder to look. He was biting his lip, pink under pearl, growing dark. He licked the edge of his teeth and his bottom lip on the same swipe. "I like you a lot."

Pink light softened the edges between them, of their faces, of the wary gaze shared — while the orange light of the heater caught Lux from behind. Cael's shoulders betrayed the flattery under the fear, and Lux smiled as he tipped his head to kiss the thin whorls. Guilt followed their pattern, twisting in on itself and dragging its weight down, but Cael said nothing. He felt Lux breathe deep and kiss where the line broke to trail down his arm. He said nothing when Lux caught him looking, when he lifted to kiss him back against the couch, and his fingers pinched to break the thread at his waist. Lux slipped the hand, thread still wound over his pinky, into the loosened hem of Cael's shorts. His mouth found the join of his throat and collar, the strange skin over the implant that felt like another place for Lux to slip inside him, and Cael closed up around his shame to shiver for the touch.

 _One for the road:_ it wasn't a thing he could bear, the pair of them stripped on the soft comforter and lamplight painting the scene like a gentle fire. Lux did not know, and wanted to stay, and _did not know_ — but Cael had erased every mark from his skin and wanted the next ones to be these hands, that mouth.

It was unfathomably selfish, but Cael was both such things. He struggled against the weight of the kiss, the heat it struck down his center, to nudge Lux back and crawl over him. Lux moved his hand to Cael's hip, still under his waistband, and gave up control of the kiss; Cael drove it down against the arm of the couch until Lux was sighing and helpless. He moaned into the short space, salt and sharp beer on their tongues. Every day, Cael could have this, or something like it; every day he could wake up and go to bed with the promise of it. He shivered and framed Lux's jaw in cool fingers, kissing slow and thorough to melt the warm body beneath him. The big frame softened, pliant, not a hint of uncertainty when their eyes met.

Happily pinned, happily possessed. "I'm going to fold you up and have you right here," Cael promised, and Lux shifted his hips with a groan. He tightened each of his fingers at Cael's hip, and Cael let himself be pulled between opening thighs, to rub the promise through their shorts. He could wind Lux something fierce, just switching that careful figure eight against his grip, a slow wave of friction he was prepared to ride one-speed to the finish line. It was best when it wasn’t urgent, or when he ignored the urgency for the tease — his hips could set the rhythm and hold, sway-drag-dip-lift and breaking pattern for none of the sounds Lux gave him. It wasn’t the moans he was after, or the perfect dark in his gaping mouth. He wanted to lose himself to the movement, to the flush of Lux’s skin, to the moment he lost himself as well.

Lux met his eyes under a hood of dark lashes, gold at their edge. His eyes were dark and deep, the perfect mirror, and Cael let his arms shudder where they braced at Lux’s sides. They were wet and sticky and not stopping, Lux’s hips rolling and a litany of _yes, please, don’t stop_ whispered under his breath. Cael pushed against the muscle of his thighs, strained his arms and Lux’s legs to kiss him again and barely scrape his teeth on the skin below his bottom lip. Lux gave a shiver with all of himself, whining into the kiss and leaking into his shorts.

It wasn’t what Cael was after either, and he lifted back, driving the moment on. Lux watched him go with want shaping his brows, drawing lines between them and softening his features. The moment he gave up control of the rhythm — when his eyes slipped shut and he made a sound from deep in his gut, raw and hungry — that was close to it.

Cael drew a long, warm breath, steadying himself before moving down. Lux gasped for the lapse of contact, his cock straining the wet fabric without a weight to trap it. He had the strength to take Cael by the head and force him down, to grip him by the arms and drag him back in, to rut against him until he finished; but he loved this as much as Cael did, was as hungry for the air on his skin as the careful press and drag of Cael’s tongue, when he dragged the shorts half down his thighs and used a grip on them to pin his legs up against his chest. “Oh Cael,” he breathed, thick and ragged; he looped his own arms at the knees, exposing himself without having to be told. “Please, oh, _please, Cael_ — ” 

With his own hands freed, Cael knelt down on his arms and spread him at the cheeks, gently scraping his teeth over hair and skin until Lux’s thighs shivered and his moans reached a peak of sound that broke into pained silence. His cock was flushed and leaking onto his stomach, and the flush spread down under Cael’s mouth as he dragged it, sucking and kissing at the hot skin until he could press his tongue into the hole with his finger. He wanted — to crawl inside the moment, to not exist, to not exist _outside of this_ , so that he might never move on from it. He wanted to nudge his way inside, lick the edges, feel Lux shake and shout and hold his own legs back from the urge to kick.

It was too hot, too close — Cael couldn’t quite breathe — but it wasn’t the dark halls of The Cages, and it wasn’t the back rooms, and every place Lux touched him Cael could sit up and get away. He tried it, abruptly in the world and dragging in a real breath. Before him, Lux did the same, gasping for air with his head and neck tossed back over the arm of the couch. His lips formed the shape of Cael’s name, but there was no more sound.

Cael dove again, pushed Lux’s hips higher, exposed him for his mouth. He bit him once in earnest, over the firm swell of his ass, and Lux gave an explosive sob before dropping a hand to Cael’s hair and — leaving it.

No tug, no push. Just the warm weight and a body shaking apart around him. The swell of fondness lifted him to fit between Lux’s thighs, kissing his way up to hum and tongue the head. His teeth wouldn’t allow anything else, but he threaded his hands between them — one nudging two fingers back inside, the other wrapping around Lux’s cock to pull short strokes between the base and his own chin.

What Cael was after, what he received, was Lux setting his palm firm to his head and his fingers shaking against taking a grip. Was Lux folded too tight to the couch to move his hips, driven apart by the rhythm of Cael’s hands. Was the taste of him washing every other taste from his mouth, erasing the long twilight and trapped words from his throat. This wasn’t the skin Lux had touched for the last four weeks, but he was touching it now — sweating and spilling on it, squeezing it with his thighs, shivering and scraping his calves over Cael’s back in the comedown.

Sliding his arms between Lux’s thighs and chest, Cael dragged himself up through the mess. He was only half-hard, but his shoulders still lit the space, competing with the heater’s glow, and Lux squirmed to feel him when he slid hips to hips. “Not yet,” he groaned, damp with sweat and panting into the open air.

Cael tucked his face to Lux’s throat and kissed a bruise to the shoulder. Lux twitched once, settled, lost none of the heat from under his skin. “Need — a minute,” he sighed, softening and settling in increments. The muscles of his legs trembled to unhinge and lay flat to the couch, tangled with Cael’s own legs. “Need a few minutes, after that.”

“Take your time,” Cael murmured, dragging his head to mark the other shoulder. “Eat, drink, have a wash.” He lifted up, dropped, gravity behind his kiss until he rolled off Lux and found his feet. “When I get back, you won’t be getting up for awhile.”

A breath blustered behind him as he turned, hips caught in their sway. Six more days: he didn’t have to think about it until then.

-

Twilight was eternal on the beach: Cael could drift or drown in the bath at any hour, and walk out of the waves under a sky shifting pink-purple-teal through the stages of a setting sun. It was behind the trees, somewhere, shrunken inside a bloom at the heart of the Garden. Sometimes gold showed him the outline of the deepest trees, solar light like Odysseus’ arrow through the rings, a miracle that sank into the meat and bone of his chest.

He’d fallen for it tonight, shot back into a dune with the golden head melting inside his skin. What form it would take, his foresight gave no warning — it was stripped down and frayed at the end, sent down too many paths in moments alone.

Every decision rang a deep red bell, sinister at the edge of his senses, and laid him paralyzed. The hands of the dune closed around his throat, and his foot twitched, begged to move, but Odysseus had been long at sea and his legs must have buckled on the shore, must have failed him. He closed his eyes, and thought: _Lux might know._ He squeezed them tighter, and the hands touched their nails to his pulse, unlocking his limbs like a set of strings.

He must not think of Lux in this place.

His spine unlocked, nerves waking with the stars pricking visible in the fading sky. With a wet cough, he swallowed against the grip on his throat and pulled, sitting up with hands on his hands, fingers lacing, and even those that didn’t claw their grip left soft bruises on his skin. It didn’t have to hurt, to be unwanted. It didn’t have to be unwanted, to sting when the surf crashed into him on the way out. The hands at his throat choked him to silence: he gasped for air, rolled to his knees, and tugged forward against a tether of arms — braiding tanned skin and sinew into a short leash that disappeared beneath the sand. Recovering his breath, he wheezed it out in half a scream, to see the clean nails and ruby rings decorating the gruesome thing.

The dunes were traps with a specific set of hands at their center, but this was many at once, seeking purchase on his arms and legs and gripping each to each to deny him his voice or feet. The shore was a distant crash, a scent on the breeze. He could not see the sea over the edge of the dune, the heavy grey tree laid across its topmost edge: at the curve, a thick branch grown perpendicular, and a thinner branch from the next, and — he spun in the tether until its braided hide touched his bare skin with the warmth and pulse of a living thing.

Cael twisted out, acid risen and sharp to the roof of his mouth. A shot through his sinuses set him choking. When he tried to stand, his tether caught him at the throat and tripped him back: every cough was their bitter taste, and every grain of sand scraped his skin with the pads of their fingers. He stood, and tripped, and retched, and stood, and shook, a cat’s yawning squeak of a cry managed as he tipped to his knees. Tears blurred the frantic focus, cut his eyes moving from the thinnest branch along its spiral. He needed something to grab onto, to pull himself out, to get to the shore and dive into the waves that would wake him — 

Three boys now sat on the dead trunk, ruddy knees and pale legs swinging in unison. Their shoes shone with polished leather, and they held paper cones of fried flesh in their left hands. Grease shone on their fingers and mouths, their tongues chasing the taste, and their eyes were charcoal dark and dull in the twilight. A thousand beads of black sand, packed in their skulls and showing between their teeth.

He snarled, showing his own, while the hands of his tether caressed a choking hold to his throat. The sea growled and hissed beyond them, and his leash still gave no room for him to stand.

There was no waking up.

The boys laughed, the middle pointing out his wide eyes to the others. Food and black ichor dripped from their mouths. On his left, the other turned over his paper cone, pouring the hot morsels down upon him: the oil popped and burned where it touched his skin, and a wave of black sand broke against the edge of the dune, rolling down behind their legs. For a moment, that was all there was: a blank canvas, black ink, pink knees, children’s shoes. Cael was out of his body in terror, rolled over and down from the pain, and the hands reaching through the sand dragged him back to it. The third boy unbuckled his thin belt and slid it free of its loops, louder than the distant hiss of the tide, and Cael was a burdened beast struggling to its knees and feet with a bellow — all teeth, all sinew under his scars and surging forward to drag a harvest of rage.

He carried two semblance-steps forward, and his voice carried for furloughs: a scream that broke, and keened, and became a child’s high shriek before it caught the top wind and went flat.

Another black bloom for the Garden, seeded in his throat.

He screamed again, ragged and wordless. His brittle self could not bend, his arms were dry and covered in cracks when he fit his hands to the leash and made to tug it from the earth: the left shifted sideways at the shoulder, a perfect, tectonic crack splitting him off, but the tether pulled the first of their hands up from the sand and revealed the knuckles of another around its wrist.

Cold water slapped him on the cheek — the sting burned his skin, a thing to shake off. He shook to his feet and stamped it out his heels, threw his weight into the next pull and tossed his head: he was a panicked horse in the flicker of old film, frothed sweat on his hide and white-eyed, shining coins catching light from the bottom of a fountain. _Oh,_ he wished, _oh please,_ he wished a second time. His right arm split and pulled away, hung from the tether with its plaster grip, and he could not stop screaming. He could not stop pulling, dragging one thin foot behind the other up the side of the dune.

Cold water slapped him on the cheek. There were so many hands, with so many rings, each gripping another wrist. Black sand packed between their fingers, and the next hand was mud-streaked, red and black clay on pearlescent blue. Her pearly nails dug into the flesh of the first man, and her wrist followed, and the arm behind it. Cael stopped with her exposed to the elbow, the bright white of her hair stark where the crown of her head broke the sand. Her hand twitched, then the head, attempting to lift through the broken soil. “One for the road,” the boys crowed, stood up on their tree and sprouting black feathers along their smart wool coats. “One more, one more, one more — ”

He ripped his own lip in his teeth and leaned back against the leash until his eyes tipped up to a bloody sunset; he dragged the air into his chest and didn’t — _don’t look, don’t look at her_ — he gathered the voices crushed perfect and glittering at the base of his throat, and let loose such a scream as to drown them out.

Her hand released the tether, only to find a higher grip and tug: Cael braced at the edge of the dune, ankles cut and buried in the sand, and she met his tug with one of her own. When her face broke surface and her eyes opened, they were starlight, blue fires burning and searching his own: he strangled, and shouted, and chipped his legs off at the calves tripping back over the dead branch. On his back, his head tipped and still feeling the cold burn of her hands on his disembodied wrists, he could see the carrion boys running down the shore, scattered by something bigger, something worse — 

“Cael — ”

He felt her lips against his palm, cold and dry. He made to push her face away, but his arms were not attached to his shoulders, his legs were broken at the shins and slivers of him were scattered between his prone form and the tree: she would climb up the dune, he knew. She would come up over the silvered tree with her burning eyes, she would cut him sternum to ilium and crawl inside, and he could not stop screaming — 

“ _Cael_ — ”

The water rushing over him was another voice, was a physical slap to his face and a hot hand shaking him at the shoulder. “Cael, please, _please stop_ — ” the hands clawed their grip around his arms and dragged him up from the rushing sea, out of twilight terror to its aftershock: the room was vibrating, every pane of glass trembling in its frame, void pressed to the edges of the room and frosting the corners. Lux stood against the shield, limned gold at his edges and hot to the touch. His eyes were wide, watching Cael fling himself backwards from the trailing end of his scream and into the nearest wall.

“Don’t touch me,” he rasped, hand moving to his throat. “ _Don’t_ — ” his hands tested the soreness inside with his fingers pressing against a bruise Lux had kissed to his skin, hours before.

The only bruise: there was no ring of hands, no nails dug to his pulse. It was the deep dark of night beyond the quivering window. It was only the pair of them in the space, and only the pair of their voices wrung out and breathless, struggling to find the words. Lux opened his mouth and closed it, brows slanting together; he backed himself into the bed and sat, his hands palm-out and golden against the chill of the room. The pair of their breaths steamed the air, and Cael’s skin prickled with the sweat before a wave of nausea. How long had he been in this skin, since his last job? How long had Lux put his mouth on the trails of other mouths? How long had she been clawing her way back from the bedrock, buried six feet under with the ocean seeping a trail of salt back to the surface?

“I feel sick,” he moaned, using the wall to guide his stumbling panic toward the bathroom. His shaking hands scraped the plaster, counted — one, two, three, he pricked it with void on the fifth tap of his nail, and Piko layered her voice inside his skin, to the sound of Lux without, telling him to stop.

One, two, three — he knew where he was, he knew, and he knew Lux was getting up from the bed. A snatch of foresight meeting the peripheral movement, meeting the sound of the springs and the slap of a sole to the floor. His ears were trained for any sound of skin against — for any sound of skin, and it drove a flinch up his spine with a hammer and a thick spike. It put the spike through his spine and his ribs, had him leaking air, crushed his nails into the door frame and he swung himself around the corner to escape.

 _No_ , he shouted for the brush of fingers at his arms, another spark of void marking the wall, dragging a line through the plaster as if he’d pulled free a wire. He could not shake the chill, could not shake the phantom walking in his footsteps. If he turned into those hands, if he broke in the ring of those arms, there would be no getting up.

Lux would stay, and Cael would not go, and every trail from that moment was a line of fire sweeping out, and every other trail sunk cold to the floor of a dark ocean. They were halfway round a spiral, and Cael could put his hands through the black leaves and open a door for only one of them. “No,” he said again, growling it at himself, and pushed Lux back with a flash of violet so cold it left the palms of his hands burning. When he reached the bathroom, he flung the door shut in his wake.

Lux would not go, and Viera would send someone to the apartment, and — 

Cael found the sink, used it to hold himself up, and hit the tap before vomiting. A thin trail of spit moved through his sob, another dry heave, no louder than the water, and he shut his eyes in fear of black ichor or sand gathered around the drain. All of him was shaking, his hands tight to the edges of the sink, and he shook himself to aching stillness when Lux thudded his presence against the door. Void rattled the mirror on its hinge and sang vibrations through the glass jars lining the high shelves, but the cold did not touch his rattling limbs, and he felt no bite from the tile when he sank to his knees.

“Are you alright,” Lux asked through the door, the handle unchecked. His voice was tight, whittled to a thin edge: “Can I _do_ anything?”

 _Go away_ , Cael answered, soft and without feeling. _Leave me alone_ , no louder than the water gurgling in the drain. When his fingers managed the handles, when the water cut, he breathed himself back to the room. He was not spiraling, or did not have to spiral so quickly: he was not dissolving out of this body on a bad trip, bubbles in his blood and his spit gone seafoam blue. He was not kneeling for anyone’s hands, for all that his face stung from the slap, for all that his skin crawled and his bones shook for the memory of them. He was in his bathroom, safe at home, with the danger waiting patient and kind on the other side of a door.

The mirror stilled before his hands did. He dragged the void back into his skin, brittle and hard, and made himself crawl along the wall to the door. He did not want his voice to echo in the strange space, and return to him with other voices behind it: “Can you just leave, can you just — go for a walk, anything, I don’t care but I just — ”

“Yes — that’s fine, that’s okay. If you need space, if — ” Lux scraped his hand flat to the door, opposite Cael’s ear, the loudest sound in the apartment. “You’ll be okay?”

“Two hours,” Cael begged, into the wood, into the cup of Lux’s palm against it. His eyes were tight, red lines framing his face, the twist of his mouth, the slant of his teeth: he wanted to pass through the door and feel it against his face one more time. He wanted to fit it to the burn of his cheek and know, in his bones, that Lux had only meant to wake him from something worse. It was both of them scared, and both of them trapped, trying to push through the barrier to find the other. Tears gathered in his lashes and slid hot down his face, following the line of his winged marks.

 _Open the door_ — the hollow in his ribs vacated his ghost, and instead there was an ache like the bite of a knife. Lux would not care, if he just let him in. If he just laid it bare, the tether of hands would drag them together, bury them up to their necks in the sand, and Lux would hold his hand in the dirt. There was very little left to take him away from, if he did it now.

The phantom slid through the door into Lux’s arms, lost its footing, let itself be carried back to bed and made warm again. Let itself keep them both up, afraid to sleep, and stayed and stayed and stayed — 

— and Cael did not follow in its place.

“Please go,” he whispered, the door colder when Lux pulled away.

He looked down, at his shaking hands, at the fact of Lux’s shirt draped over his frame. A salvaged sail strung to the moldering wood of a wreck, it caught the wind of his deep breath and he choked, sobbing into the fabric between his face and palms. They were no imitation of the pair he wanted, and no substitute, small and cold through a shirt that already smelled more of the void than the person it would swallow.

He needed to take it off. He needed to take it all off, his shirt and his skin and his spiking nerves, to wander the garden and approach the beach from the trees. He needed to start pulling everything out by the roots and bury it, burn it, drown it in the sea. He needed to drag Calliope so far into the ground that she’d never claw free, and freeze every layer of earth he could manage to lay between them.

 _Please_ , Piko said, rolling her points up the back of his neck, heavy and warmer than he’d ever felt her. _Please don’t do this_.

“I have to,” he said into his hands: “I have to let him go.”

She disengaged with a pinch, dragging up a segment of his sweat-damp hair. _It’s okay, if you’re not okay yet_ crackled through the room, echoing a fragment of his voice. Cael turned to find her with his eyes wet and slicing the air with their shine, slanted in his snarl: “This is different,” he argued, swatting at her with his hand. She rolled sideways in the air and lifted out of his reach, her porcelain points reflecting violet light, her white eye steady on his own: _please, please_ — 

He was younger in that fragment, and hatred burned another sear of bile up his throat. “I told you we’d take the next job, Piko. You know what she’s like, if we don’t go — we know who it’s going to be.” His voice dragged, and he moved to the sink again, his heart shoving into his throat and leaking all through him.

 _You said we’d make a friend,_ Piko demanded, in her wretched, plaintive voice. It scratched the ceiling with her points, a flash of white on magenta, and she scraped the soundproofing dodging the toothbrush he threw.

“It’s the second week of the month, it’s — ” he threw the paste without rising from the hook in his eyes, the tears crushed out of him and weighing him down. It hit the opposite wall without clearing the arc of his own arm. “It’s Dareus again, Dareus fucking _Tyndarid._ ” When he stumbled, the sink was still there to catch him, and the mirror caught the light in crystalline patterns as it frosted over. Piko rattled against the ceiling, pulling fragments too fast to process, spitting his voice in nonsense arguments that pricked him like void breaking brick. When the clips ran into a single kettle whine and broke, he put his head to the cold edge of the sink, and sagged.

“I never said we got to keep him.”

-

_A Hunter is as good as his instincts,_ was another of Andal’s favorites. A Hunter was also as good as his glib descriptions, and Lux could not meet the standard for either, standing in the empty room. He had walked out the door when told, put the cold, soaked sheets in the wash, and walked some feeling back into his legs in the comparative warmth of pre-dawn autumn in the city. He hadn’t even noticed Cael slipping out into it behind him, hadn’t imagined him needing anything more than a bath and several cigarettes with his cat.

But of course he needed more. Of course it had been the wrong thing, or one wrong thing too many, to listen to the first words out of his mouth. The knife in Lux’s gut always twisted to remind him how shit he was at _right things_.

The note had been left on the bed, as if Cael had known: Lux must return to this point. That Lux would bring back the sheets, washed and dried. That Lux would need to gather him close and kiss the crown of his head, the back of his neck, and ask very quietly if he wanted to talk about it. Phantoms and cold spaces, drifting him through the last six weeks. The bed had been the anchor: a place to be warm, and solid.

> _I need you to leave. I don’t want you here anymore._

A lot of words for a _no_ , but it got the point across. Lux had spent a month training his eyes to skip and skim over the slant of Cael’s hand; if not for his name atop the ripped page, he would have ignored the terse note. Cael had never left him one before, but Cael had never been a negative space in the apartment when he returned, had always been a trail of cigarette smoke or humid air that led him to the balcony or bath.

Cael was gone, today, and Lux had read the note. Lux had flipped it over and examined the indents on its opposite side, held it up to the light to decipher.

> _She sets the fire and she puts it out; she teaches me not to need the ghost, void will take back what I lose. She is the thing that hurts, then stops hurting, then soothes, until she is all of them. Feared and loved; poison and essential. I could not live without her. I am not sure I am alive without her now._

The closest journal was on the bedside table, atop a book of poetry Lux had deemed safe entertainment — a view to Cael’s tastes, if not his inner world. His hand wanted to sweep it onto the floor, and his heart led the petty cry, but he slid it careful to the side and opened the blank cover.

Lux had flipped pages, skimmed the dates and entries like he could find the space from which the note was torn, use the earlier entries to decode it to mean its opposite: _I need you, please stay, please find me._

Instead: her. Poison and essential, dated the morning word had come of Andal’s death. As good a nail as any, driven into the ache at his hip. He crushed the note in his hand and shifted his weight. He dropped it on the floor. He set the empty pot of lotion on the page, to hold it open, to let it be known: _I saw this._ He sniffed, and sucked in a breath. “Fucking hurts,” he said, voice small and moving nothing within the space.

A mystery woman, calling through Piko. A bedside journal. An unsigned note, breakup via two sentences.

He’d been stabbed again, he was dying slow, and no one was going to fix it this time. There was no phantom sense, Cael coming back, spinning into Lux’s arms and tucking his hands in his pockets. His slim, perfect hands, with their pearled nails, with their scarred fingers. With the long lines up the underside of his arms and the silver ivy of his back, with his hair hiding half of his face. The space was empty, and the next Lux must inhabit was the hall, the street outside, a universe stretching forward made of negative space. Pollux Tyndarid knew — 

_Just me,_ he thought, and the pain lanced higher in his gut. The note might be the only sign it happened at all, after the bruises faded and he managed to forget the seaside musk of his skin.

Lux sniffed, and set the table back to order. He stacked the books, he picked up the note. He was bleeding out with tears cutting hot across his eyes, and he didn’t want to hurt him.

Feared; poison.

Loved.

_I need you to leave._

His body took a kind of pity, turning him away from the bed, stumbling him from the room. He could not track the moments, his steps; he dragged a hand through the echo, feeling the chips and lines in the wall, the places Cael had ripped the plaster with his own hand; the bathroom replaced the bedroom, violet replaced the pale dawn. Cael had a day and a city to disappear into, and Lux did not know him to give chase. Did not know where to start, to find it in the books.

_I don’t want you here anymore._

He wiped his eyes on his sleeve, filled his hand at the sink and dripped the cold water over his face. The bathroom was reflected behind him, dully lit from narrow windows at the ceiling’s edge, one corner dancing with a violet water-light from the jars gathered on a high shelf. That was how Cael kept things: in journals, in jars, preserved and untouchable. Lux could sit in the main room and read through them until Cael came home, could inspect every jar behind the mirror or on the shelves, or he could understand — that the apartment was another jar, and Cael didn’t want to keep him in it.

It didn’t matter, if he wanted to be kept. It didn’t matter how stupid it was, to sink this far into a place when he knew so little about it. In the mirror was the version of himself that would stay, was a man dragged into a mess and trapped — with dark circles under his eyes and his skin washed out in the strange light. He had lost weight, before and after walking through Cael’s door. He had woken up a little colder, as the days chilled and he tucked Cael closer in the night. _You don’t stay. You can’t stay._ Of course he couldn’t, and Cael couldn’t: gravity had remade the space into one they barely left, and the weight he’d seen Cael carry around the apartment was now visible on his own shoulders, in the way his collar caught purple shadows, in the long draw of his dripping face.

“What am I doing,” he asked no one.

He remembered Cael closing the cabinet, tipping up to kiss his cheek. His hair had been over his face in the reflection, and it had just been Lux, smiling at its edge. He hadn’t felt tired at all, and he hadn’t imagined a single reason to leave. Tears cut him again, but he wrestled them back with a deep breath through his teeth and an inverted strangle — the air twisted together in a noose of sound, inside his throat. He shouldn’t have left. He should have waited outside the door, or pushed inside. He should have lifted the hair back from his face, he should have read the words on the pages, he should have — 

Lux opened the mirror, slanting the lights sideways and finding no eyes to meet in the space. The next breath came easier, and the jars on the shelves meant no more than they did. He took a green glass bottle from the topmost shelf, set it next to the sink, stared down at the dull pink crystals within. I was here, it said, without the malice of shoving every jar and bottle into the sink and running the water over the leaking contents.

Even that sliver of intent shook his hand, but he left the bottle standing in the unflattering light. The violet shine danced on every edge, and he did not know what he was still doing there. What he meant to do, if Cael returned, or if he didn’t.

_I don’t want you here anymore._

He took a deep breath. He ran the water again, splashing his waxy face. He started so hard his shoulders locked in a neat line of pain across his back, when Epsilon flashed into the air beside his head with a sharp chirp. “It’s Cayde, calling from the Tower this time.”

Water formed violet drops in the growth of his beard, growing them until they fell on their own weight: “I suppose that makes it important for once.”

Epsilon chided with a roll of his points, a dip on the air. His ghost settled on his shoulder like a warm hand, and he was a frayed edge again, standing at a sink and missing someone. For every moment lost, and every moment thrown into question — he could remember the point where Cayde had taken him by the arm and not said anything at all.

It wouldn’t be the worst point, to return to: “Lux.”

“Where are you kid?”

The exo’s voice wasn’t much different, filtered through Epsilon; his eye was steady in the mirror, casting its own light into the hollows of Lux’s face. “Nowhere. I just...got stuck downtown for a bit. I’ll come back tonight.”

“Tonight-tonight?”

“Maybe. I’ll try.”

“You sound kinda rough. I could pick you up, if you want.”

“No, I’m okay.” Lux buried and released a laugh from his throat, hands testing their own pull in his pockets to stretch his arms, and finding one empty. The rabbit’s foot was gone — still in Cael’s pockets, somewhere out in the city. There was nothing left to keep him from shattering, in his pockets or the apartment. In the entire damn neighborhood, he was sure, and he sagged his aching hip against the sink, cupping Epsilon with his hand instead. “I got robbed.”

“You? What the hell did they take?”

He stared into the mirror. Epsilon was a blue light in the purple dawn, and there was a negative space at this side, going cold. There was a hole in his side, leaking more than blood. “Nothing. Something I should’ve buried weeks ago.”


End file.
